With Malice Toward None

a sermon preached at the First Unitarian Church of Alton on February 12, 2006, by the Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V

 

Reading #1 - “Mr. Lincoln and the Bible” by Z. A. Mudge (adapted):

A visitor in Washington once had an appointment to see Mr. Lincoln at five o'clock in the morning. The gentleman made a hasty toilet and presented himself at a quarter of five in the waiting-room of the President. He asked the usher if he could see Mr. Lincoln.

 “No,” he replied.

 “But I have an engagement to meet him this morning,” answered the visitor.

“At what hour?” asked the usher.

“At five o'clock.”

“Well, sir, he will see you at five.”

The visitor waited patiently, walking to and fro for a few minutes, when he heard a voice as if in grave conversation.

“Who is talking in the next room?” he asked.

“It is the President, sir,” said the usher, who then explained that it was Mr. Lincoln's custom to spend every morning from four to five reading the Scriptures, and praying.

 

 

 

Reading #2 - This letter was written by Lincoln to Fanny McCullough, daughter of William McCullough who was a former clerk of the McClean County Circuit Court in Bloomington, Illinois.  McCullough and Lincoln knew each other well.  During the Civil War McCullough was killed in a battle at Coffeeville, Mississippi:

 

Executive Mansion

Washington, December 23, 1862.

 

Dear Fanny

 

It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You cannot now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.

 

Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother.

 

Your sincere friend

A. Lincoln

 

 

With Malice Toward None

In Springfield, everybody knew it - Abe Lincoln was crazy.  He had been seen wandering the streets with his Bible, ranting at anyone who would listen - and sometimes just to himself - not even trying to save people but talking wild about how our Holy Book contains half-truths and lies.  My, my.  Can you imagine?  He hadn’t slept, he wasn’t working, and he cared nothing for personal hygiene - he stunk to high heaven.  And he looked terrible.

Lord knows he always looked funny enough before:  six-foot-four, gawky appendages all out of control, a face only a mother could love.  And his mother had died.  Sister, aunt, and uncle died, too.  Who ever knew what had caused his latest breakdown?  Some people said he mighta got turned down again by one of his few love prospects.

A guy came by the shop here once’t, said another of Abe’s girls had died a few years earlier.  Guess that’d do it - send a body right over the edge.  ‘Specially one that tends toward the bizarre anyway.

They say he had friends.  Close ones, ones that would try to keep up with him through all his strange shenanigans.  But they also say he’d get to where he just wouldn’t listen to ‘em.  Go off on some tangent, get all weird-like.  Nope, you just can’t tell about a person like that.  Best to keep your distance, you never know whether what he’s got might be catching.

 

We usually don’t think it’s very nice to talk about our heroes like this, but there’s a new book out that seems to do just that.  Lincoln’s Melancholy, by author Joshua Wolf Shenk, has the subtitle, “How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness.”  Shenk argues there that Abraham Lincoln suffered from bouts of clinical depression, what was called melancholy at the time.  This mental illness - and depression is classified as a mental illness - has been well-documented by previous historians, Carl Sandberg among others.  But as Shenk explains, mental illness of any sort carries such a social stigma that Lincoln’s struggles of that variety have been largely ignored when it comes to figuring out what made that great man great, what brought a backwoods bumpkin to national prominence and gave him the courage, ability, stamina, and just plain chutzpah to take on the yoke of the Presidency at such a desperate time as he did.

You could say that Abe Lincoln had a hard life.  As we all know, he grew up in a log cabin, which is an image that reeks of romance and the quaintness of quiet nights on the prairie.  Through those long nights, as the mythical story goes, he read by candlelight, pouring over the classics and studying to become a lawyer.  What a lovely image - Honest Abe, studying hard, pulling himself up by the bootstraps, a real American rags-to-riches success story.

But look past that image for a moment, to the difficulties and the barbarities of life on the frontier, where the work was never done, the fruits of one’s labor never sure, the continuity of one’s connections to community never certain.  Death was an ever-present reality:  his mother died, his sister died, other family members died.  His first love (according to some), Miss Ann Rutledge, died.

Lincoln knew loss first hand.  Lincoln knew suffering in ways that many of us may not be able to imagine.  He knew emotional pain in depths that make us want to avert our eyes.  If depression needs an external trigger, Lincoln certainly experienced disastrous, depression-inducing events in abundance.  If depression is a purely internal reaction to external events, Lincoln was known to be predisposed to his (what they called) melancholy from a young age on.  He was known to speak of suicide and even wrote poetry about it, and his favorite poems all seemed to be about death.  (Mine are, too, but we’re talking about Lincoln here.)

There are many descriptions from his contemporaries about Lincoln’s propensity of keeping to himself, sitting in a corner, head drooping, a look of extreme sadness on his face.  And those descriptions say that he would sit like that for hours, and then come out of that personal cocoon to open up and tell funny stories to an individual or a group and laugh heartily with them for a moment, only to retreat again to the chair in the corner and to his mental landscape of apparent anguish.

At one point, he put on paper an eloquent explanation of the way he was feeling in the depths of one of his depressive moods.  On January 23, 1841, Lincoln wrote a letter to John T. Stuart, his first law partner. In that letter, Lincoln wrote:

“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 cannot tell;  I awfully forebode I shall not.  To remain as I am is impossible;  I must die or be better, it appears to me.”

Just after that letter, in 1841, Lincoln was diagnosed as having ‘hypochondriasis,’ the name for a set of symptoms believed at the time to be caused by too much black bile in the gut.  The treatment, as prescribed in a book by Universalist doctor Benjamin Rush - who (as we’ve recently mentioned in the UU&You! class) was a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and considered the father of modern psychiatry - the treatment was to bleed the patient severely and to ‘blister’ the temples and neck with heated cups, drawing blood to the surface.  Then vomiting and diarrhea were induced to purge the bile further.  When the patient was thought to be cleaned out, he was fed stimulants - coffee, tea, ginger, black pepper - and then made to exercise extensively, especially by riding on horseback.  If the treatment sounds worse than the disease, frequently it was - sounds like an early example of the “no pain, no gain” philosophy.

 

So Lincoln was no stranger to illness, no stranger to personal loss, no stranger to death.  How could he put all those troubles behind him as he stepped onto the national stage in the midst of the crisis that was the 1860 election?  Well, the short answer is that he couldn’t.  The short answer is that his illness - depression - would lurk in the shadows and travel with him the rest of his life.  The short answer is that he carried all that baggage with him as he took the train to Washington, as he took the reins of power, as he worked to keep the Union from falling further and further apart.

And it didn’t get any better.  His daily life in Washington was taken up with job seekers, sycophants, and critics, as well as the minutiae of running a war.  He never had a general he thought he could trust until 1864 when Grant came along and Lincoln finally handed the military decision-making over to him.  Day to day, life was a workaday drudgery that never let up, to be contrasted with the lives of our present-day Inside-the Beltway bunch. 

And Death always hovered close.  In 1862, Lincoln’s beloved son Willie died, and his parents grieved mightily.  Lincoln also grieved mightily the thousands upon thousands of Americans who had been lost and would continue to be lost in the war he oversaw.

Lincoln himself had made decisions in carrying out the office of the Presidency that had sent people to their deaths - thousands, no less.  He had done it because he felt he had to, because it was all he could do.  And it showed.  Look at his photographs.  Look into those eyes.  No silly smirk of immaturity on that face.  In Lincoln’s eyes, you can see the sadness.  You can see the pain.  You can see the weight of living with the knowledge that the decisions one makes everyday mean life or death for real people in real places in real situations.  This war was not just a spot on a map halfway around the world for this President - these were his people and this was his country and these were his decisions and he felt them most keenly.  [Remember the letter to Fanny McCullough that was one of our readings this morning.  He personally wrote many of those letters to grieving families around the nation.  Imagine today’s leaders doing that.]

He also felt most keenly the importance of ridding this country of what he thought was a great sin.  He built his 1860 campaign on ending slavery - not next week, not next year, but some fine day in an indeterminate future.  In the beginning, it wasn’t that his heart went out to field hands that he knew to be his equal in every respect.  No.  Like most white folks of the time, he held paternalistic and condescending racial ideas that would appall us today.  But he did want to live by the words of the Declaration of Independence - “all men are created equal” - rather than the Constitution, wherein some men are to be counted as only three-fifths.  He knew that the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery had to go, that it was ruining the lives of the enslaved and of the slave masters and of the whole country both North and South.  He had to be pushed on this point by many, notably Frederick Douglas, but pushed he was and the decision was his - an Emancipation Proclamation that may have had little technical effect in law, but had great emotional and practical effect throughout the land and probably hastened the end of the war and the end of slavery in America.

 

Would any of us have done as well?  I’d like to think that our connection with this church means we’d step up and do what needed to be done, but I’m not sure, if only about myself.  Lincoln was not a church-going sort most of his life, which is not to say that he was not a believer in some way.  Recall the reading we heard earlier concerning Mr. Lincoln and the Bible - early in life, he read scripture to tear it apart, but later on in life he read for guidance.  Regardless, his was no soft theology of the suburbs.  He knew that it was possible for God to be on both sides of a conflict, or perhaps on neither side of a conflict.  He said more than once that he surely hoped, not that God was on our side, but that we were on God’s side - a hard-won humility if ever there was one.

 

In his Second Inaugural Address in 1865 less than six weeks before he was killed, he preached a theology of forgiveness rarely heard in national settings, especially the nationalistic ones we’ve grown used to.  He concluded his short address that day with these words:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

With just a few words, Lincoln set out more than anyone else what this country could be, should be, would be after the war.  “With malice toward none, with charity for all…”  He was speaking directly, of course, about how to treat one’s former enemies. 

But I ask you to hear his words again this morning, not simply as a plea for tolerance, but more broadly - as a call to acceptance of those who suffer; of those who live with illnesses of various kinds; of those who, like Lincoln himself, live with mental illnesses - melancholy, depression, or a hundred others.  Let’s treat each other with the respect and dignity that every person deserves.  Lord knows there’s enough to be depressed about without us treating each other badly. 

 

Back in Springfield, we all knew he was a mess.  We avoided him like the plague.  But thinking back on it now, after he freed so many people, I wish’t I’d taken more time with him.  Yessir, he freed a lot of people even while he himself was a captive of that illness of his.  What I wouldn’t give to shake his hand now.