Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [66]
Lincoln drafted a letter to Mary ending the engagement. He asked Speed to deliver it, but Speed refused, warning that he should talk to her instead, for “once put your words in writing and they Stand as a living & eternal Monument against you.” Lincoln did go to see Mary and, according to Speed, told her that he did not love her. As soon as she began to weep, he lost his nerve. “To tell you the truth Speed, it was too much for me. I found the tears trickling down my own cheeks. I caught her in my arms and kissed her.” The engagement was temporarily renewed, and Lincoln was forced into another meeting to sever the engagement. This second confrontation left him devastated—both because he had hurt Mary and because he had long held his “ability to keep [his] resolves when they are made…as the only, or at least the chief, gem of [his] character.”
DURING THIS GRIM WINTER, sorrows came to Lincoln “not single spies/But in battalions.” Joshua Speed announced his intention to return in a few months’ time to his family’s plantation in Louisville, Kentucky. Speed’s father had died, and he felt responsible for his grieving mother. On January 1, 1841, he sold his interest in the general store where he had lived and worked for seven years. Speed’s departure would bring an end to the pleasant evenings around the fireplace, where the young men of Springfield had gathered to discuss politics. More discouraging for Lincoln, Speed’s departure meant the loss of the one friend to whom he had opened his heart in free and easy communion. “I shall be verry lonesome without you,” Lincoln told Speed. “How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world. If we have no friends, we have no pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss.”
The awkward dissolution of his engagement to Mary and the anticipated loss of his best friend combined with the collapse of the internal improvement projects and the consequent damage to his reputation to induce a state of mourning that deepened for weeks. He stopped attending the legislature and withdrew from the lively social life he had enjoyed. His friends worried that he was suicidal. According to Speed, “Lincoln went Crazy—had to remove razors from his room—take away all Knives and other such dangerous things—&c—it was terrible.” He was “delirious to the extent of not knowing what he was doing,” Orville Browning recalled, and for a period of time was incapable of talking coherently. “Poor L!” James Conkling wrote to his future wife, Mercy Ann Levering; “he is reduced and emaciated in appearance and seems scarcely to possess strength enough to speak above a whisper. His case at present is truly deplorable.”
In Lincoln’s time, this combination of symptoms—feelings of hopelessness and listlessness, thoughts of death and suicide—was called hypochondriasis (“the hypo”) or “the vapours.” Its source was thought to be in the hypochondria, that portion of the abdomen which was then considered the seat of emotions, containing the liver, gallbladder, and spleen. Treatment for the liver and digestive system was recommended.
“I have, within the last few days, been making a most discreditable exhibition of myself in the way of hypochondriaism,” Lincoln confessed to his law partner and friend John Stuart on January 20, 1841. Desperately, he sought a post office job for Dr. Anson Henry, who would leave Springfield if the job did not materialize. His presence, Lincoln told Stuart, was “necessary to my existence.”
Three days later, Lincoln wrote Stuart again. “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.”
Hoping medical treatment