President Buchanan is reported to have said to President-elect Lincoln as they rode down Pennsylvania Avenue on the latter's Inauguration Day: "My dear sir, if you are as happy on entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland [Buchanan's Pennsylvania home], you are a happy man indeed." But Abraham Lincoln did not expect to attain "happiness" in the White House or, as this intellectually energetic book shows, anywhere else. Lincoln's Melancholy sounds again the half-forgotten, minor-key background music of his life. Joshua Wolf Shenk rejects the notion that Lincoln got over his melancholy under the demands of the presidency; his Lincoln is never too busy to be gloomy. And, drawing on modern studies of depression, Shenk even has a reference -- humorous, I think -- to "happiness" as a mental disorder.
In 1998, Shenk (a young essayist who frankly mentions his own battles with depression) read a reference to Lincoln's melancholy in an essay on suicide and set about learning more. In his researcher's zeal, he read Lincoln scholars and also sought them out and interviewed them; he went to Lincoln's birthplace and Ford's Theater, stood where Lincoln delivered the "house divided" speech, held in his hand Lincoln's letters to his friend Joshua Speed, saw the fatal assassin's bullet and, since heredity is one ingredient inclining a person to depression, obtained the records admitting Mary Jane Lincoln, Lincoln's father's cousin, to the Illinois Hospital for the Insane in 1867. He even attended a convention of Lincoln impersonators, borrowed a Lincoln suit for himself and joined in. His book has page after page of acknowledgments, to the point that one may be tempted to say: No wonder a writer with this many friends could produce such a strong book...more here
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