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Faces of ABE

February 10, 2006 12:00 am

AFTER UNION DEFEATS at the battles of Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg, President Abraham Lincoln told friends he wanted to hang himself.

“If there is a worse place than hell, I am in it,” he said. And when Edward D. Baker, a Lincoln political ally from Illinois, was killed fighting for the Union at Balls Bluff in Loudoun County in 1861, President Lincoln sobbed openly and inconsolably as shocked bystanders—including at least one journalist—watched.

As attitudes about mental illness begin to change, some historians are concluding not only that Lincoln, whose birthday is tomorrow, suffered from depression, but that the disease helped forge his strength of character and an indomitable determination.

Learning to deal with the depression that dogged him virtually his entire life helped Lincoln endure the emotional pain and self-doubt of personal tragedies and a national crisis without parallel in American history, some experts say.

The 2006 History Channel program “Lincoln” focuses largely on this premise.

According to Joshua Wolf Shenk’s 2005 book “Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness” (Houghton Mifflin), newspaper reporter Charles Carlton Coffin wrote that when Lincoln left the White House after learning of Baker’s death, his head was down and “his chest was heaving with emotion.”

The Shenk book says Coffin wrote that Lincoln “almost fell as he stepped into the street.” Coffin said onlookers “sprang involuntarily from our seats to render assistance, but he did not fall.”

Lincoln wept openly at Baker’s funeral, Shenk writes.

“It’s not contradictory that this great man also suffered tremendously—and that these two things can be seen as part of a complex whole,” Shenk said during a telephone interview with The Free Lance–Star.

“It’s part of what you see in Lincoln’s life,” Shenk said.

“The sources of suffering were also sources of strength.”

And, Shenk said, “his strength was in part drawn from the strategies that he used to live with his melancholy.”

In his prelude, Shenk relates a story Leo Tolstoy told of visiting the Caucasus region and finding the natives full of questions about Lincoln, whom they called “the greatest general and greatest warrior in the world.”

When Tolstoy showed a young man Lincoln’s picture, his eyes filled with tears.

“Don’t you find,” the young man said to Tolstoy, “judging from his picture, that his eyes are full of tears and that his lips are sad with a secret sorrow?”

‘I’m not very well’

The day after Lincoln was nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate for president, he was seen sitting alone at the convention site, filled with gloom, Shenk writes.

“Lincoln’s head was bowed, his arms bent at the elbows, his hands pressed to his face,” Shenk writes. When another politician approached, the future president said, “I’m not very well.”

Richard Striner, author of the 2005 book “Father Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery” (Oxford University Press), said, “His emotions are extremely important, and have to be understood to make sense out of his life trajectory.”

But, Striner stressed, Lincoln combined great intellect with sensitivity spawned by depression to become the man he was.

“Lots of people are depressed, and the outcome can be vastly different,” he said, “depending on intellect and character.”

Richard Carwardine, author of the 2005 book “Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power” (Albert A. Knopf) and the Rhodes professor of American history at Oxford University, said in a telephone interview with The Free Lance–Star:

“I think the depression was important. I have no doubt at all he had serious bouts of what he called ‘the hypo,’ and certainly, as a younger man, it was quite disabling.

“What strikes me is how President Lincoln continued to function—and function amazingly.”

When Lincoln was a boy, his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died before his eyes of a sudden and frightening illness.

When he was a young man, the love of his life, Ann Rutledge, died.

Later, his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, had her own serious mental health issues that he had to deal with again and again.

When his young son Willie died in the White House, Lincoln was so grief-stricken that he repeatedly visited and uncovered the tomb to look upon the boy’s face and weep, some historians say.

“With the death of Willie and the growing slaughter of the war—in particular, the final summer of the war—the anxiety and the sense of responsibility he felt could have been absolutely crushing,” Carwardine said.

“What strikes me is just how extraordinarily mentally resilient and tough he was,” he said.

“He had strategies for coping—one of those, an obvious one, was in humor, in storytelling,” Carwardine said.

‘Life-affirming sense of humor’

Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the 2005 book “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” (Simon & Schuster), prefers to focus on how the president used humor to deal with “melancholy.” She said in a written statement that during her research, she was surprised by Lincoln’s resiliency.

“The vitality of the man, the magnetism of his personality, and the life-affirming sense of humor was much greater than I had realized,” Kearns said in the statement. “His face seemed so sorrowful in all his pictures that I was delighted to find that he possessed a marvelous sense of humor, a great ability to tell stories. Indeed, he was the one—time and again—who sustained the spirits of his colleagues during the darkest days of the war.”

Despite that, Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon once said, “His melancholy dripped from him as he walked.”

Shenk notes that Lincoln himself wrote in 1859, “If I be in pain, I wish to let you know it, and to ask your sympathy and assistance; and my pleasurable emotions also, I wish to communicate to, and share with you.”

But that kind of honesty, Shenk said, may be impossible for today’s leaders.

He noted that Sen. Edmund Muskie’s political career went into a downward spiral when he appeared to shed tears during the 1972 New Hampshire presidential primary campaign. Muskie later claimed they were snowflakes.

Shenk said that in modern times, a leader openly displaying the slightest self-doubt or pain over a decision “is evidence of some kind of flawed character.”

All human beings experience profound pain, he said, but we as a culture are requiring our leaders to hide that—and even lie about it.

‘As fundamental as walking’

“We all ask fundamental questions at moments of great pain,” Shenk said.

“Somehow these qualities we see in Lincoln’s life have come to be seen as inappropriate in modern politics. Today’s politicians are punished for that.

“Shedding tears is as fundamental to human life as walking,” Shenk said.

“It’s part of who we are. How do we come up with an idea of political leadership that’s not consistent with human qualities? Are we getting better leadership by asking [politicians] to avoid these very human expressions? We see in Lincoln’s case, there’s another way.”

He said Lincoln’s depth of capacity for self-evaluation was “not inconsistent with decisive and powerful action,” and his “depth and uncertainty” allowed him to closely examine all sides of every situation carefully without being paralyzed.

“He would wrestle with the consequences of his actions and their effects on the world around him and that gave him so much moral depth,” Shenk said.

Of the requirements placed on leaders today, he said: “Putting on a mask might be helpful in the short term, but it may be that ultimately it will come to be seen as a mask. If you look across human history, the things and people we appreciate are the ones that get into the depths of real human life. We remember Emily Dickinson. We remember Herman Melville. We remember Lincoln. These were people who really plumbed the depths of who they were with a lot of engagement—and a lot of pain.”

Shenk said today’s culture doesn’t appreciate “depth and authenticity and engagement.”

Mark J. Rozell, an expert on the presidency and the media, said it isn’t fair to expect Lincoln’s kind of naked emotional honesty from current leaders such as President George W. Bush.

“Of course the contexts are very different,” said Rozell, who is director of the Master of Public Policy Program at George Mason University in Fairfax. “Everything that presidents do today is broadcast around the world and scrutinized. It’s hard to imagine a president today showing emotions the same way Lincoln did. Most likely, few at the time were aware of Lincoln’s emotional reaction. If a president did that today, every psychoanalyst–pundit would be on cable TV programs assessing his state of mind and emotional stability.

“Presidents today are expected to give the appearance of strength, and sometimes this means masking real emotions,” Rozell said.

Carwardine, who also has written the book “Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America,” noted that something in Lincoln’s makeup kept him from the self-righteousness displayed by some political leaders in America today, in spite of the righteousness of his cause in saving the Union and freeing the slaves.

In Lincoln’s second inaugural address, rather than gloating over the South’s impending defeat, he said that perhaps the war was God’s punishment to all of America for 250 years of slavery.

In his immortal “With malice toward none; with charity for all” 1865 inaugural speech, Lincoln said, “Let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”

Striner, a professor of history at Washington College in Maryland, said sensitivity to others’ pain created by Lincoln’s depression may well have been the tipping point in freeing the slaves.

“That’s very likely,” he said. “People have often talked about the compassion that came out of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s polio. The suffering Lincoln went through did make him more sympathetic.”

Striner recounted an anecdote from Lincoln’s youth in which he stopped to pick up a small, injured bird.

“His rollicking comrades found it quite amusing,” Striner said. “But Lincoln said he had to do something.

“Lincoln felt a tremendous amount of sorrow over the suffering of little animals,” he said.

“Later, he felt he had to do something about the issue of slavery,” Striner said.

Striner said that in 1841, Lincoln saw slaves being transported on a riverboat and observed to friends that “it was like so many fish on a trout line.

“Years later, he was still tormented by that image. Yes, indeed, I think [depression-related sensitivity to others] is extremely important,” he said.

Carwardine agreed, calling Lincoln “a man vulnerable, as it were, to humanitarian entreaties.

“I’m sympathetic to the idea that, maybe generally, severe depression makes you more sensitive to the vulnerability of others,” Carwardine said.

That, combined with political genius, Striner said, fundamentally changed America.

“People like Lincoln don’t come along very often,” he said. “One remarkable individual can make all the difference. Without Lincoln in the White House during the Civil War, things could have gone horribly wrong. Look at the contrast after Lincoln’s assassination. Things deteriorated with terrible speed.”

The ultimate sacrifice

He said a combination of depression, feelings of guilt about the war and increasing religious fervor led to Lincoln’s repeatedly placing himself at personal risk—ultimately with disastrous results for the country. Striner pointed to the story of Lincoln going to Fort Stevens (near Silver Spring, Md.) during a battle in 1864 and standing upright on a parapet, wearing his famous stovepipe hat, making him recognizable—and easily shot dead.

“Lincoln was offering himself as the ultimate sacrifice,” Striner said.

“It was the Golden Rule. He was willing to show God, ‘I am willing to prepare to pay the same price [as dying soldiers]. If that’s your will, if that’s your pleasure, God, strike me down.’

“I cannot prove that,” Striner said. “But he listened to advice about his personal security and he was very intelligent. I think it was the tremendous sense of sorrow and responsibility for the bloodshed and the loss of life.

Not that he would do it differently. And I do think it’s possible that the depressive side of his character was associated with that.”

That pain and guilt ended up seriously damaging America when Lincoln was assassinated, Striner argued.

“However much I admire the loftiness of Lincoln’s religious sense, it was really a damn shame that he did not take better care,” Striner said. “We could have had the civil rights revolution 100 years sooner.”

MICHAEL ZITZ is a staff writer with The Free Lance–Star. Contact him at 540/374-5408, or mikez@free lancestar.com.

Washington among presidential ‘Good Guys’

By MICHAEL ZITZ
The Free Lance-Star

TWO DOCTORS studying the psychology of leadership place George Washington in a small group of U.S. presidents they call the “Good Guys.”

Steve Rubenzer and Thomas R. Faschingbauer authored the 2004 book “Personality, Character & Leadership in the White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents.”

The book offers insights on the personalities of presidents from Washington to George W. Bush carefully culled from extensive interviews with many experts.

The authors began the Foundation for the Study of Personality in History in 1994 with a study on presidential personalities, inspired by criticism of President Bill Clinton, who they classify as an “Extrovert,” along with John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt.

Rubenzer is a forensic psychologist; Faschingbauer a retired clinical psychologist.

President Washington was born in Westmoreland County and grew up at Ferry Farm in Stafford County before moving to Mount Vernon in Arlington.

Richard Lahey, a National Park Service historian at Washington’s Birthplace in Westmoreland, wouldn’t disagree with the “Good Guy” assessment, but says the first president “was a hard guy to get your arms around—someone who was extremely private and always disinterested in having his personal life in the press.”

Lahey said Washington didn’t like “to talk to anybody but his friends” about private matters.

Today, Lahey noted, politicians are forced to talk ad nauseam “about how they grew up. Washington wasn’t that way."

Rubenzer agreed with Lahey.

"Washington was introverted," Rubenzer said.

"Fairly introverted, but not terribly so. ... He wasn't comfortable wearing his heart on his sleeve. He was a pretty formal guy who preferred a little social distance, with a great emphasis on manners, being polite and respectful to others."

“Personality, Character & Leadership in the White House” concludes that today, honesty and straightforwardness make success in the White House difficult, in spite of polls that show that’s what the public says it wants.

The authors conclude that, “A president’s character has no relation to how good historians judge him to be.”

Washington did do a good job of “spinning” his image in one way, though.

He was said to “have a really bad temper,” Lahey said. “It was said that the only thing that trumped his temper was his self-control.”

Lahey said Washington’s resolve “gave him a certain kind of bearing—something that people wanted to follow.”

In the film “The Patriot,” Lahey noted, the director chose to convey Washington’s presence merely by showing his shadow—and that was powerful enough.

“He could have ruined it all by being a chatterbox,” Lahey said.

He said Washington passed through the world with “great fluidity, but wasn’t much of a talker.”

There will be much talk about him in the next two weeks, however.

Marion Nelson Winship, instructor of American history at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, will give a lecture on “Washington’s Sense of Place” at 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 18, in the George Washington’s Birthplace National Monument Visitor Center, 38 miles east of Fredericksburg at 1732 Popes Creek Road in Westmoreland County near Colonial Beach.

Admission to the lecture is free.

The 550-acre site includes the “heart” of the plantation owned by Washington’s father, Augustine, the foundation of the home in which the first president was born and a 55-foot granite obelisk erected in 1896.

It also features a memorial mansion, outbuildings and a garden and farm.

The Washington Family Burial Ground there contains the remains of Washington ’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather.

Washington was born on Feb. 22 in 1732.

On Monday, Feb. 20, park ranger programs interpreting Washington’s life and accomplishments will be given hourly. Costumed interpreters will perform plantation activities and farm chores throughout the day.

Also on Feb. 20—a federal holiday—gingerbread and hot cider will be served at the Log House from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m., compliments of the George Washington Birthplace National Memorial Association.

On Feb. 22, birthday cake and punch will be served at 1 p.m. in the visitors center. Admission is free both days.

Free Lance–Star librarian Craig Schulin contributed to this story.

According to the Web site (http://www.personalityinhistory.com/default.asp) of the Personality and the Presidency Project, White House “Good Guys” include George Washington, Rutherford B. Hayes, Zachary Taylor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Grover Cleveland and Gerald Ford. Good Guys “almost never feel themselves to be worthless, are rarely jittery or tense, and don’t feel overwhelmed by stress. They make good decisions even under adversity. They have a hard time lying, aren’t crafty or sly, and don’t trick, bully or flatter people to get their way. They don’t spend much time fantasizing and daydreaming, but don’t deny problems.”

Dominators

The project concluded that presidential “Dominators” include Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Andrew Johnson, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, Teddy Roosevelt and Chester Arthur. “They are prone to bully others and to disregard the feelings and rights of those not on their side. They are bossy, demanding, and domineering; they flatter or manipulate people to get their way. They bend or break rules, and as presidents, stretch the constraints of constitutional government. They are not religious or spiritual, and tend to be prejudiced.”

Introverts

Those classified as “introverts” by the project are John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, James Buchanan, Woodrow Wilson and Benjamin Harrison. “Introverted presidents are psychologically minded, complex, deep men. They are not regarded as warm and friendly, and have difficulty controlling social situations. They prefer to work alone and avoid close relationships. Often jittery or tense, they are not happy and high-spirited; they tend to feel irritable, overwhelmed by stress, and to overreact.”

Innocents

William Howard Taft, Warren Harding and U.S. Grant are classified as “Innocents.” “Submissive and accept domination easily gullible, naïve, suggestible. Not autonomous, independent or individualistic, they sometimes don’t assert themselves when they should. Compared to other presidents (who are an industrious lot), they have trouble getting motivated and down to work, and are lethargic, sluggish, lazy, and slothful.”

Actors

Ronald Reagan, Warren Harding, William Henry Harrison, Bill Clinton and Franklin Pierce. “Compared to other presidents, actors are gullible, naïve, and suggestible, warm and self-disclosing; they allow their feelings to show on their faces and in their posture. They are not meticulous, perfectionistic, or precise and tolerate unethical behavior in colleagues. Actors are enthusiastic, spirited, vivacious, zestful, charismatic and charming.”

Maintainers

William McKinley, George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford and Harry Truman. “Maintainers stay focused on the job, work slowly but steadily, and are industrious, persistent, tenacious, thorough. They are uncreative, unimaginative, and do not indulge in elaborate daydreams and fantasies. They are conforming and conventional, not rebellious.”

Philosophers

James Garfield, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Jimmy Carter and Rutherford Hayes. “Compared to other presidents, Philosophers are curious and inquisitive, interested in science, and fascinated by patterns in nature and art. They are concerned with philosophical issues (religion, the meaning of life) broadminded They are also nice people: They believe that everyone is deserving of respect.”

Extroverts

FDR, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, William Harrison, Warren Harding, Andrew Jackson and LBJ. “Extroverted presidents are enthusiastic, spirited, vivacious, and zestful; they call attention to themselves. They are impetuous, uninhibited, unrestrained, are not consistent, predictable, or steady. They don’t take pride in being rational or objective.” Free Lance–Star librarian Craig Schulin contributed to this story. For more information on the Personality and the Presidency Project, see the Web site at personalityinhistory.com/Default.asp, or the book “Personality, Character & Leadership in the White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents,” published by Brassey’s and available at Amazon.com.