Abraham Lincoln and Man’s Search for Meaning

Three weeks ago, I heard a lecture about Victor Frankl. He was a psychologist who was incarcerated in the Theresienstadt ghetto, Auschwitz, and other concentration camps. After the war, he published his great work under the title Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen (Nevertheless, say yes to life). It was re-published in English as Man’s Search for Meaning, which is considered one of the best books of literature ever written. Frankl believed that people are primarily driven by a “striving to find meaning in one’s life,” and that it is this sense of meaning that enables people to persevere through painful experiences and intense suffering. But when I heard about Frankl, it immediately brought to mind a very different historical setting and person: Abraham Lincoln, who was living Frankl’s message nearly 100 years earlier.

Who doesn’t know Abraham Lincoln’s story? It’s told everywhere, schoolkids learn it from kindergarten. Every President’s Day we sat down and made two pictures: a cotton-ball wig for George Washington, and a black construction-paper stovepipe hat for Abe Lincoln. Ugly, tall, kind, smart, freed the slaves. That’s him.

But Lincoln’s story, like so many American stories, was cut to fit. My sermon is not about racism, nor slavery, but it does touch on Lincoln’s life’s work, so I want to address this aspect of his belief system before we tackle the man behind the Tall Tale. Lincoln was given a reputation in the early 20th century as a great man of equality, but that has tarnished in the past years, because Lincoln was, in fact, racist, as nearly all whites in the United States in his time. Now, at the same time, he understood deeply that slavery was wrong, and that a nation built on the acceptance of slavery was wrong. Lincoln’s construction paper picture has been cut, patched, and mended over the years. He has been a martyr to white Northerners, a traitor to white Southerners, an ally without being a friend to African Americans. People have used Lincoln’s memory to bolster many competing theories and opinions, and they continue to do so.

I don’t want to boil Lincoln down to a single set of principles, or a voting record. Who was he, then? In 2005, Joshua Wolf Shenk wrote a book entitled “Lincoln’s Melancholy”, which attempted to create a fuller picture of an enigmatic President. And when we see this new picture, we realize it’s not a “picture” at all, but a three-dimensional person who did what Frankl wanted all of us to do: he persevered through his own suffering to find purpose.

Abe Lincoln grew up in poverty, to parents who both had histories of chronic depression and anxiety. His father was known to go off into the woods for days at a time, and people in their neighborhood sometimes worried he just wouldn’t come back. His mother was often regarded as melancholy or sad herself. And since we know today that depression and anxiety can definitely be hereditary, I don’t find it weird that Lincoln suffered from it, too. From boyhood, he was known as being mercurial: he would run away from his work, to read books for hours, then later jump up on a stump and impersonate the preacher for the other kids’ entertainment. He and his first roommate, Joshua Speed, would often help each other over hard times, encouraging each other out of their low times, although generally they both were considered good natured and easy going. But in his mid-20s, he had his first major depressive episode, and it shook him to his core. Ann Rutledge, who was a family friend and around Abe’s age, died suddenly. No one really knows why her death particularly sent him into a deep depressive state, but it did. His friends and acquaintances eventually had to organize a suicide watch for him, and one couple took him into their home, just to make sure he was eating. The community response to this intellectual, friendly young lawyer’s descent into a suicidal episode is heartwarming, but from the accounts, the response should be considered *anyone’s* normal response to seeing the suffering of their friend.

Depression, or “melancholy” as they called it in 1840, was a common affliction that people were used to seeing and experiencing. It was not considered to be quite so clinical as we treat it today; it was a normal part of life, and people were more open about their emotional states at this point in the 19th century. Some historians think that it’s because people lived more communally at this point, others think the Romantic literature of the time was a gateway that gave young men especially, the freedom to express themselves in more emotional ways. Both could be true.

At any rate, Lincoln fell down a deep hole in this time in his life, and for more than a year, he could not get out of it. He complained to his friends that he might never recover, he might just end up dying if no relief came. But one day he came to the conclusion, as he told his friend Joshua Speed, that he must either die or get better, and since he didn’t want to die, he needed to figure out how to get better. Lincoln was a natural intellectual who never went to law school but instead studied on his own and passed the bar without mentoring, and he basically used logic to “think” his way out of his depressive state.He was not a Christian; he aligned much more strongly with Universalism, but he did believe in a Hand of destiny. He started from the premise that everyone was predestined for something. Then he reasoned that he felt in his soul that he was not meant to die just yet. That must mean that there was a Purpose for him, if something was keeping him from dying. And so, he cast around, looking for something he could work on fixing. And he found it. Lincoln had already wrestled with the paradox of a country “conceived in liberty” that allowed the ownership of other people. Now he decided that mending that great wrong would be his life’s work. As Victor Frankl said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Lincoln, very consciously, chose his way.

This Purpose would end his long friendship with Joshua Speed, who became a slave owner. It would keep Lincoln a Sisyphus for his whole political career, constantly pushing the giant anti-slavery boulder up mountain after mountain, as people assured him over and over again that it was political suicide to be *so* against slavery. People at the time disliked him, because they thought his stance against slavery meant he was also anti-racist, even though he was not and said so often (this is an interesting twist on how we perceive Lincoln today — we assume he could not really be against slavery if he was racist; they assumed that being against slavery presupposed he was also anti-racist). He lost many elections because of this conflation of antislavery with antiracism. His election as President was ridiculed by many — he won because the ticket was split on the other side. In fact, his election sparked the Civil War, because the Southern states knew what the election of a radical Republican would mean. At the same time, abolitionists mostly disliked him for being so slow to act. Frederick Douglass said he was useless on more than one occasion, before the two reached understanding and Lincoln began to see that his racism was his own mental weakness. No one wanted him to lead the party, because no one in Washington knew him very well or trusted him enough — he was a nobody from nowhere, more or less (you can see why people compared Obama to him — Lincoln gave one massive speech and was propelled by strange circumstance into the White House; there are obvious parallels). Politicians also thought he was silly and changeable; he told strange jokes and stories at the worst times and often avoided serious discussions. And to top it all off, everyone agreed he was also the saddest person they had ever met.

But wait, you might say. I thought he worked his way out of his depression, by gaining a Purpose. Well, he worked his way out of THAT particular episode of depression, but he never actually cured himself of anything. Lincoln suffered from chronic depression for his entire adult life; he wrote about it to everyone he knew, and told people often that he was sad or melancholy, and he never felt that he had conquered it. The Purpose just kept him going, in spite of everything. Again, I want to quote Victor Frankl: “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.” This was how Lincoln persevered.

I’m going to stop for a bit here, to talk about psychology. There is a kind of psychology that has been gaining traction over the last several years, which is informed by Victor Frankl’s work on perseverance. It’s called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT. A friend of mine teaches this therapeutic model at the University of Chicago. She says a foundational tenet of ACT is that the “abnormal” is actually normal. The term “health” is usually considered to be not only an absence of disease but the ability to resist disease, and physical “normality” means you have no disease and are not at risk. This works for physical health. But it also makes people think that if they are going to stay mentally healthy, they need to get to a place where they never struggle with “bad” feelings nor are ever at risk of struggling with “bad” feelings. Physical health and mental health are not the same thing, though. Negative emotions are not diseases. In our lifetimes, 50% of people will engage with suicidal ideation at some level. By definition, half of a population doing something means the thing can’t be abnormal, which means negative feelings are not abnormal. By extrapolation, that means these feelings are not a sign of disease — they are normal feelings. But we still cling to a medical model that mental “health” means feeling good *all the time*. ACT proposes that we turn this whole thing on its head and instead focus therapy not on “feeling better,” but “getting better at feeling” — accepting negative feelings as normal parts of our psyche, rather than diseases that don’t belong. This is in line with Frankl, who wanted people to live with purpose even if they hold negative feelings or thoughts. And Abraham Lincoln, the saddest man anyone knew, came to this same conclusion in the 1840s, and structured his whole life around the fact that while he knew he could never “feel better,” he could and did get much, much better at feeling.

How did he do it?

Well, Lincoln had two habits that people found odd and mentioned a lot: his jokes, and his poetry.

His jokes were often strange, but always amusing. At a journalism banquet held in 1856, Lincoln — not being a journalist — felt rather alienated. Addressing his audience, he compared himself to an ugly horseman. This fellow, while riding one day, happened upon a woman who curtly remarked, “Well, for land sake, you are the homeliest man I ever saw.”

“Yes, madam, but I can’t help it,” he responded.

“No, I suppose not,” she allowed, “but you might stay at home.”

Based on the way that he told jokes all the time (and he was well known for telling jokes to relieve tension or show a point with humor), you might think that his poetry would be similarly humorous. But…no. This poem, written in the 1850s, shows how morose it was:

You are young, and I am older;

You are hopeful, I am not —

Enjoy life, ere it grow colder —

Pluck the roses ere they rot.

Lincoln’s poetry was as sad and dismal as his jokes were ironic and funny. But those two pursuits apparently kept him on an even keel, allowing him to feel what he wanted. He was known to read his favorite works — sad, romantic poetry and sometimes, the Book of Job — and then get up and continue his day in a happier frame of mind. Conversely, he once told a Congressman who was frustrated with his constant joking and threatened to walk out of a meeting, “I have great confidence in you, Congressman Ashley, and I know how sincere you are. But if I couldn’t tell these stories, I would die. Now sit down [and listen].”

Joshua Shenk, who wrote Lincoln’s Melancholy, argues that without his intellectual reason, jokes, and poetry, Lincoln would never have made it through his life, let alone accomplished what he did. These three things gave him relief, refuge, and kept him connected to the world. It also gave him the opportunity to do something that Acceptance and Commitment Therapy urges everyone to do, which is to examine, and sit with, our feelings, allowing them to happen. But then, we must get up and keep going. Lincoln once advised a disgruntled and depressed general that “he who does *something* at the head of one regiment, will eclipse the man who does nothing at the head of a hundred regiments.” Lincoln was giving his own tools to this general. He used his tools of logic, poetry, and jokes to win his small battles of life — having a meeting, dealing with a hard task, perhaps even getting out of bed — and he seemed to know that these small victories could lead him towards a purposeful life.

In most biographies of great people, there is a sense that the hero must overcome their own nature in order to be truly great. Lincoln, however, never did. It’s probably fairer to say that he made peace with his nature; the lesson of Lincoln’s life is one of wholeness. Because of that, it’s pretty easy to see him as a kind of mystic, a person who transcended his nature in order to achieve greatness. But did he? Lincoln was a realist at a time when the nation desperately needed realism. He was not happy, not optimistic. He struggled, and his political enemies often tried to use that pessimism or realism against him. But he knew what needed to be done and he worked towards that goal. The people, the voters, loved him for that, because he was still only a man. He never tried to curate his own image. As I said, he struggled with racist ideology for almost his entire life, even admitting in letters that it limited his ability to reason clearly. He didn’t transcend himself — he had permanent ink stains on his fingers because he wrote too much bad poetry. His pants were always too short because he didn’t care about his appearance. When he told a funny story, he would throw one leg up in the air and laugh and laugh; everyone agreed he was ridiculous about his jokes. Basically, he was not a myth. The good thing is, that means we can learn a lot from him that we can use in our own lives, and his story is accessible enough for us to emulate.

When Lincoln died, it was on Holy Saturday. He had received personal word of Appomattox from Grant on Good Friday and was shot later that evening. Edward Everett Hale, the Unitarian minister, gave a stirring Easter Sunday sermon to his shocked and devastated parish:

“Lincoln seemed to be lent to us simply for this work. We hardly knew him before. He came to us, unknown, like a revelation of strength and trusty firmness; and so he left us, just when the first shout of victory told that the strife was over. Thus did he save us. Yet he was only a simple-hearted, a true hearted, a tender hearted man. This is why we loved him so, and why we mourn.”

It seems like Hale, and other writers of the time (because Hale was not the only one who mentioned this), knew that Lincoln was distant from them, was reserved into himself for some reason, yet he worked for the world and gave his whole self to the Cause he committed himself to. This was the beginning of Lincoln’s myth, but because Lincoln was already so distant, it meant that people never even realized that he tried, struggled and failed just as much as any of the people he served.

When I started this project to tie Abraham Lincoln to modern psychological therapy, I already thought of Lincoln as a role model. The model I had in my mind for most of my life was the construction paper hat — just a role model for commitment to a great Cause. But Lincoln is actually a role model for an entirely different kind of commitment: loving and living with your faults, using them to help fight all kinds of battles. Joshua Shenk suggested that his commitment to his faults made Lincoln transcendent, but I don’t think that’s accurate. Transcendentalism is focus on going beyond oneself, but Lincoln never expected himself to change much at all; in fact, because he believed so strongly in a pre-determined fate, he was sure he *could not* change his nature. He just kept working, kept insisting that his own suffering was less important than the suffering he might prevent with his work. Who ever heard of a President who had anxiety? Who had depression? Who struggled to get out of bed? But a true role model shouldn’t be a myth. Lincoln’s own ways of dealing with his depression: examining his feelings through poetry and reasoning his way out of an episode with logic, forcing himself to action through jokes or laughter or play, are all tactics that today we consider to be cutting-edge. He made himself better at feeling, rather than focused on just feeling better. That is a role model I will be proud to hold up for myself to copy.