Actually, it was a rediscovery of very old terrain. I was intrigued enough to investigate the subject and discovered an exciting movement in the field of Lincoln studies. In 1998 I chanced upon a reference to Lincoln's melancholy in a sociologist's essay on suicide. 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."
SHROUDED IN SANITY HOW LONG TO BEAT FULL
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. He told jokes and stories at odd times-he needed the laughs, he said, for his survival. 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.
Lincoln's look at that moment-the classic image of gloom-was familiar to everyone who knew him well. As Bross approached, Lincoln noticed him and said, "I'm not very well."
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. Later the lieutenant governor of Illinois, William J. The crowds dispersed, leaving behind cigar stubs and handbills and the smells of sweat and whiskey. On the contrary, said a man named Johnson, observing from the convention floor, "I then thought him one of the most diffident and worst plagued men I ever saw." Yet to the convention audience Lincoln didn't seem euphoric, or triumphant, or even pleased. Men threw hats and canes into the air, shaking the hall so much that the awning over the stage collapsed according to an early account, "the roof was literally cheered off the building." Fifty-one years old, Lincoln was at the peak of his political career, with momentum that would soon sweep him to the nomination of the national party and then to the White House. When Abraham Lincoln came to the stage of the 1860 state Republican convention in Decatur, Illinois, the crowd roared in approval.
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