Interviews October 2005  Commander in Grief  Joshua Wolf Shenk
on how melancholy both tore Abraham Lincoln apart and gave him
strength book cover  Lincoln's Melancholy [Click the title to
buy this book]  by Joshua Wolf Shenk Houghton Mifflin 368 pages
In the winter of 1841, Abraham Lincoln's life was a shambles.
His political career was stalled; he felt bound to a woman, Mary
Todd, whom he did not love; and his closest friend, Joshua
Speed, seemed likely to move away to Kentucky, or to marry the
girl whom Lincoln did love. Under the intense strain, Lincoln
fell apart, and talked openly with friends about committing
suicide. "Lincoln went Crazy," Speed wrote. "—had to remove
razors from his room—take away all Knives and other such
dangerous things—&—it was terrible." Soon after, Lincoln wrote
an emotional letter to his law partner in Washington, D.C.
That Lincoln struggled with intense depression would not have
been a surprise to his contemporaries, or to those who read
accounts of Lincoln written in the ea