Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [67]
Throughout the nadir of Lincoln’s depression, Speed stayed at his friend’s side. In a conversation both men would remember as long as they lived, Speed warned Lincoln that if he did not rally, he would most certainly die. Lincoln replied that he was more than willing to die, but that he had “done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived, and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for.”
Even in this moment of despair, the strength of Lincoln’s desire to engrave his name in history carried him forward. Like the ancient Greeks, Lincoln seemed to believe that “ideas of a person’s worth are tied to the way others, both contemporaries and future generations, perceive him.” Unable to find comfort in the idea of a literal afterlife in heaven, he found consolation in the conviction that in the memories of others, some part of us remains alive. “To see memory as the essence of life came naturally to Lincoln,” Robert Bruce observes, for he was a man who “seemed to live most intensely through the process of thought, the expression of thought, and the exchange of thought with others.” Indeed, in a poem inspired by a visit to his childhood home, Lincoln emphasized the centrality of memory, which he described as “thou midway world/’Twixt Earth and paradise.”
Fueled by his resilience, conviction, and strength of will, Lincoln gradually recovered from his depression. He understood, he told Speed later, that in times of anxiety it is critical to “avoid being idle,” that “business and conversation of friends” were necessary to give the mind “rest from that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea threadbare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” He returned to his law practice and his duties in the legislature, resuming his work on behalf of the Whig Party. That summer of 1841, he remedied the absence of good conversation and intimate friendship with a monthlong visit to Speed in Kentucky. The following February, he delivered an eloquent address to a temperance society in Springfield. This speech not only revealed a man in full command of his powers; it illustrated Lincoln’s masterful approach to leadership: he counseled temperance advocates that if they continued to denounce the dram seller and the drinker in “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” nothing would be accomplished. Far better to employ the approach of “erring man to an erring brother,” guided by the old adage that a “drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”
Mental health, contemporary psychiatrists tell us, consists of the ability to adapt to the inevitable stresses and misfortunes of life. It does not mean freedom from anxiety and depression, but only the ability to cope with these afflictions in a healthy way. “An outstanding feature of successful adaptation,” writes George Vaillant, “is that it leaves the way open for future growth.” Of course, Abraham Lincoln’s capacity for growth would prove enormous.
In the same month that he delivered his temperance address, Lincoln reported to Speed that he was “quite clear of the hypo” and “even better than I was along in the fall.” So long as he remained unsure of his feelings, however, he kept himself apart from Mary. During the long months of their separation, Mary missed him tremendously. In a letter to a friend she lamented that she had been “much alone of late,” having not seen Lincoln “in the gay world for months.”
She whimsically considered taking up Lyman Trumbull—a former beau of her friend Mercy Ann