... Then You'd be Depressed Too!

If any contemporary psychotherapist were to spend 5 minutes in Lincoln’s presence he would readily conclude that Lincoln suffered from chronic clinical depression.

Why?

Perhaps because Lincoln’s childhood was plagued by a steady, unmitigated stream of frontier tragedy: his grandfather, named Abraham, was killed by Indians; his illiterate father more than once fell victim to shoddy surveying and land title practices that forced him and his family from his Kentucky farms; his nurturing mother died a slow, agonizing death in a one-room cabin [no place to hide] in front of her 9-year-old son; his beloved sister, a few short years later dead at childbirth, along with her child.

If your life or mine had been exposed to a similar barrage of negatives at such an impressionable age, surely our adult life, like his, would be deeply stamped by bottomless sadness, by yawning despair.

Grant and Bulldog Determination

The historian Stephen Oates tells the following story about a remarkable Ulysses S. Grant and his dramatic campaign to capture the impregnable fortress of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Rebel guns 300 feet above a perilous hair-pin turn in the Mississippi prevented Yankee shipping from use of The Father of Waters. By this point in the war Rebel fortifications both up- and down-stream were all in Union hands – all except Vicksburg.

“A cryptic telegram arrived from Grant. On May 11, 1863 he left Port Gibson – ‘you may not hear from me for several days,’ the dispatch read, and then he stormed northeast toward Vicksburg and Jackson, subsisting entirely off hostile country.

"For two weeks nobody in Washington knew for sure what was happening. Then on May 25 – a day to circle on the calendar – came a glorious report from Grant’s chief of staff. The general had won five straight battles in Mississippi, captured the state capital of Jackson, split the rebel forces, and driven to the very trenches of Vicksburg itself.”

After a horrendous siege of the defiant defenders inside Vicksburg, the town, and the Rebel guns, fell to the Yankees on the same day – July 4, 1863 – that Lee was to retreat from Gettysburg.

The Confederacy was to fight on for another 22 months, but their chances for ultimate success were doomed.

Lincoln's fondness for Grant's whiskey

During the Civil War, the story made the rounds that the real reason then-Lieutenant Grant out in Oregon Territory had resigned his army commission back in the 1850’s wasn’t loneliness for his family as he claimed but rather the prospect of a court-martial for drunkenness.

Of course, a story like that has remarkable staying power. At about that same time Edmund Stanton, the Secretary of War, told Lincoln pretty much the same thing, namely, that there were reports from the field that General Grant was overly fond of whiskey.

Lincoln was far from convinced, and replied, “Find out what kind of whiskey he is drinking.”

“Why is that, Mr. President?”

“Because I want to send a case of it to my other generals.”

The Purpose of Lincoln's Humor

According to Keith W. Jennison, author of "The Humorous Mr. Lincoln:" "Mr. Lincoln's use of humor changed.

“During the wilderness years he told jokes and stories without trying to prove anything at all; he told them simply because it was natural for him to do so. After he became a lawyer he found that his wit and his acute sense of the ridiculous were effective courtroom tools.

“As a politician he handed the weapon of satire as a stiletto or a broadax as the occasion demanded. During the first few months of his Presidency he used humor many times as a roundabout way of saying 'no.'

“As his responsibility grew and became almost unendurable he took to telling jokes again, trying to lessen the tensions in himself and those around him."

The Sky ISN'T Falling...

According to one source, “In the gloomiest period of the war, President Lincoln had a call from a large delegation of bank presidents.

“In the talk after business was settled, one of the big Dons asked Mr. Lincoln if his confidence in the permanency of the Union was not beginning to be shaken, whereupon the homely President told a little story.

‘When I was a young man in Illinois,’ said he, ‘I boarded for a time with a deacon of the Presbyterian church.

‘One night I was roused from my sleep by a rap at the door, and I heard the deacon's voice exclaiming, “Arise, Abraham! the day of judgment has come!”

‘I sprang from my bed and rushed to the window, and saw the stars falling in great showers; but looking back of them in the heavens I saw the grand old constellations, with which I was so well acquainted, fixed and true in their places.

‘Gentlemen, the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now.’"

Like a gushing spring...

"""Ohio journalist David R. Locke, himself one of Mr. Lincoln's favorite humorists, recalled: "His flow of humor was a sparkling spring gushing out of a rock - the flashing water had a somber background which made it all the brighter.

“Whenever merriment came over that wonderful countenance it was like a gleam of sunshine upon a cloud - it illuminated, but did not dissipate."

An Indiana Congressman, George W. Julian, recalled that President Lincoln "entered into the enjoyment of his stories with all his heart, and completely lived over again the delight he had experienced in telling them on previous occasions.

When he told a particularly good story, and the time came to laugh, he would sometimes throw his left foot across his right knee, and clenching his foot with both hands and bending forward, his whole frame seemed to be convulsed with the effort to give expression to his sensations...

“I believe his anecdotes were his great solace and safeguard in seasons of severe mental depression."

Joking before the Judge

At one point a harried Abraham Lincoln interrupted his Senate campaign to file a motion before a Chancery judge.

As Mr. Lincoln strode into the court, fumbling with his hat and the papers it contained, he announced: "May it please your Honor, I am like the Irish sailor, and beg your Honor to excuse me for this hurried interruption."

When the judge asked him to explain the reference, Lincoln responded: "Well, an Irish sailor was overtaken at sea by a heavy storm and he thought he would pray but didn't know how, so he went down on his knees and offered the following prayer:

'Oh, Lord! you know as well as meself that it's seldom I bodder ye, but if ye will only hear me and save me this time, bedad it will be a long time before I bodder ye again'."