Abraham Lincoln repeatedly experienced severe depression and suicidal thoughts, an aspect of his life that The Marginalian examines through letters, a poem and accounts from people who knew him. In a letter to his law partner, a few weeks before his thirty-third birthday, he described himself as the most miserable person alive. His suffering was so intense, he wrote, that if it were shared among all humanity, no one could be happy. The article traces this experience and proposes an interpretation of its relationship with his writing and public thought.
The account begins with his sensitivity and love of learning as a child and teenager. Lincoln told his stepsister that an ant’s life is as precious to it as ours is to us, while he reprimanded other children for treating sea turtles cruelly. Later, he would sneak away from farm work to read and study, going beyond his family’s limited educational expectations. A cousin remembered this dedication as laziness because he constantly saw him reading, writing, doing calculations and composing poems.
The first serious depressive episode described occurred five years after he had left his father’s farm. Exhaustive study for the law, day and night, had worn him down, and he had lost a great deal of weight. At the same time, a typhoid fever epidemic was causing many deaths and claimed the life of Ann Rutledge, a young woman who understood his sensitivity and for whom he had deep feelings. The article points out that the exact nature of their relationship remains unclear and that later romantic accounts rested on scant evidence.
Amid this exhaustion, grief and widespread death, his suicidal thoughts became particularly persistent. Friends and neighbors were so concerned about his condition that they arranged to watch over him to protect him. Lincoln survived the episode, but, according to the account, profound despair returned many times throughout his life. Joshua Wolf Shenk examines this recurring experience in his book Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, which serves as a central reference for the article.
After the first episode, Lincoln learned to hide his sadness behind humor and a cheerful public presence. The article reports that even close associates could fail to see the despair he was experiencing. Yet his familiarity with psychological suffering is evident in a letter to a friend who also suffered from depression. Trying to comfort him, he described how incessant thought can wear out even a sweet idea and turn it into a source of bitterness.
A different expression of this suffering was the poem The Suicide’s Soliloquy, published anonymously in a small Illinois newspaper. According to the article, it took 139 years for its authorship to be attributed to Lincoln. The poem uses a fictional narrator to convey despair and the idea that the disappearance of the self could end psychological pain. The Marginalian reads it as a literary way of exploring his darkest thoughts, without simply equating the poem’s voice with an autobiographical statement.
During a later acute episode, Lincoln wrote that he could not continue living in the same condition and that he had to get better. The account reports that his condition did indeed improve, although he had already described depression as a recurring experience. The article connects this personal journey with a public speech in which he presented the nation’s potential destruction as a result of its own actions. In this particular political metaphor, responsibility for the survival of a free society lay with the people who made it up.
The connection between personal suffering and collective responsibility is the article’s central interpretive theme. The Marginalian argues that Lincoln channeled part of his experience into comforting others, creating meaning and expressing his political ideas. This is a reading of his life and writings, rather than a research finding proving that depression produces creativity or political ability. The story presented encompasses both the severity of his psychological suffering and the support of those around him, as well as the possibility of changing a condition he himself experienced as unbearable.
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