Blue beard: a revealing look at why Lincoln's depression didn't cost him politically.

• Author: Guelzo, Allen C.
• Position: On Political Books - Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged A President and Fueled His Greatness - Book Review

Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged A President and Fueled His Greatness By Joshua Wolf Shenk Houghton, Mifflin, $25.00

We do not tend to look for great psychological depths in American presidents. Political leadership is so often a matter of subordinating every other normal pattern of life to the pursuit of power that there is frequently very little, in psychological terms, left inside their souls. But even at those rare moments when the presidency is visited upon the cranky or the idiosyncratic--John Adams, say; or Thomas Jefferson--the account which gets written of them usually has all the clinical sophistication of a toothpick. After all, the subjects of such investigations are, at least in the historical cases, far beyond any opportunity of ours to interview or observe. So, even when we undertake an analysis of the psyche of an Adams or a Jefferson, a great deal of the analysis has to be confected from a feeble sprinkling of known fact and a deluge of speculation.

Which is why Joshua Wolf Shenk's Lincoln's Melancholy should normally send us reaching for our hats and coats. Of all of our presidents, Abraham Lincoln was clearly the most psychologically tortured and the one who wore it most plainly on his sleeve. His law partner, William Henry Herndon, once said that "melancholy" dripped from Lincoln, and the stories of people who saw in his face the gnawing of a hideous sadness are too legendary and too numerous to dismiss. Lincoln himself was more than a little self- aware of his own mental gloom: "You flaxen men with broad faces are born with cheer and don't know a cloud from a star," he told Iowa congressman Josiah Grinnell. "I am of another temperament." But the misery people saw so plainly etched in the cadaverous hollows of Lincoln's cheeks also offered no clue to its cause. "Lincoln was a peculiar man," reflected David Davis, a colleague from the pre-war days in Illinois and executor of Lincoln's estate. "He was the most reticent, Secretive man I Ever Saw or Expect to See." Leonard Swett, who rode the circuit courts with Lincoln and later wrote Lincoln's biographical entry for the Encyclopedia Britannica, begged Herndon to tell him "what the skeleton was with Lincoln" that "gave him that peculiar melancholy?" Herndons best guess was that it was wrapped up in Lincoln's marriage to the unhappy Mary Todd. But he could do no more than guess: Lincoln "never talked much about his history, plans, designs, purposes, intents...