{"id":20953,"date":"2026-03-11T10:15:18","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T10:15:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpbookstore.org\/articles\/uncategorized\/abraham-lincoln-a-courage-born-of\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T06:11:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T06:11:07","slug":"abraham-lincoln-a-courage-born-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpbookstore.org\/articles\/positive-living\/health-and-wellness\/better-living\/emotional-and-mental-health\/abraham-lincoln-a-courage-born-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Abraham Lincoln: A Courage Born of Depression"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was my grandfather who gave me a lifelong love of Abraham Lincoln, one that was to help me in a way he could never have imagined. As a boy of seven, Grandfather had seen the funeral train carrying Lincoln\u2019s body home to Springfield, Illinois. From that moment, sobbing by the tracks, he\u2019d taken Lincoln as the model for his own life of battling injustice.<\/p>\n

I was seven when Grandfather gave me my first book about Lincoln. In Abraham Lincoln, the Backwoods Boy, <\/em>I read about the son of a near-illiterate farmer, walking miles through the snow to borrow a book. Straining his eyes to read by firelight because he had to work in the fields in the daytime. Starting to write and getting whipped when his father caught him \u201cscribbling\u201d instead of feeding the pigs. Lincoln went right on writing. This determined boy became my model too. I started writing, and when I had to stop to set the dinner table I was sure Lincoln would have understood my feelings.<\/p>\n

At eight, I went to a new school. I remember going for the first time to its library, much bigger than the one in my old school, with quiet signs on the tables and portraits on the walls. Over the librarian\u2019s desk was a color photograph of the president, Franklin Roosevelt, seated at his desk. On the right wall was a painting of George Washington<\/a> standing by a cannon; on the left was one of Thomas Jefferson, holding the Declaration of Independence.<\/p>\n

But it was the picture over the door, when I turned to leave with my new library card, that stopped me. It was a photograph, this one black-and-white: a tall, thin man with his hand on a table and with the saddest, most pain-filled face I\u2019d ever seen.<\/p>\n

The gold letters on the frame said Abraham Lincoln. <\/em>It couldn\u2019t be! Lincoln, my brave hero, who won every wrestling match? The ragged boy who told such funny stories that crowds would gather to listen? They\u2019d put the wrong name on the photograph.<\/p>\n

But of course it was Lincoln, and over time that portrait made him more important to me than ever. Already I was experiencing the bouts of depression that, three years later, would lead my parents to the then-rare step of taking me to a psychiatrist. Despite her help, I continued to have (and still do) occasional descents into those bottomless depths. And at these times, my model continued to be Abraham Lincoln.<\/p>\n

My depression had no discernible cause. His had many. The death of an infant brother was not unusual for those times. But his mother\u2019s death was as traumatic an experience as any nine-year-old could have. In the family\u2019s one-room cabin, there was no escaping her agonies from milk sickness, a disease then ravaging their Indiana frontier community. People who ingested milk or meat from cows that had fed on the white snakeroot plant suffered uncontrollable shaking, hideous stomach pains, continuous retching. For a week, Lincoln\u2019s mother tossed in torture on her bed, her tongue turned black, unable even to speak words of farewell.<\/p>\n

Abraham had one surviving sibling, a brilliant sister named Sarah, who was two years older and his closest companion. Abe was 18 when Sarah gave birth to a stillborn child and died.<\/p>\n

At 22 and, in his own words, \u201cfriendless, uneducated and penniless,\u201d Lincoln left the family farm to strike out on his own in Illinois. That this disadvantaged young man was able to carve out a career for himself as a lawyer seems marvel enough. The fact that he did it while carrying the burden of depression was what astonished me. \u201cLincoln was a sad, gloomy man, a man of sorrow,\u201d his long-time friend and law partner said, noting once that \u201chis melancholy dripped from him as he walked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even after his successful run for a seat in the Illinois state legislature, his sense of dejection did not lift. When a bill he\u2019d worked for was defeated, he wrote to a friend, \u201cI am finished forever.\u201d How familiar I was with this I\u2019ve-failed-and-now-it\u2019s-hopeless feeling! And yet\u2026as despairing as he felt, Lincoln somehow managed to succeed in every way that mattered.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t that his depression went away. An artist working at the White House in the final year of Lincoln\u2019s life remembered that \u201cMr. Lincoln had the saddest face I ever attempted to paint.\u201d<\/p>\n

By my own late twenties, when my depression <\/a>became incapacitating, reading about Lincoln\u2019s life was a pathway back to the functioning world. Sometimes all I could do was stare at a photograph of his downcast face. Yet in the strange psychology of depression, this cheered me. If Lincoln could accomplish so much while feeling so bad, surely I could get up and do a little.<\/p>\n

It was not until many years later that I began to see something even more life-giving in Lincoln\u2019s story. Many times in accounts of his life, I\u2019d noticed references to his melancholia. <\/em>Now I came upon the definition of that word as used in the 19th century: fear and sadness without apparent cause.<\/em><\/p>\n

Without cause? But Lincoln had so many reasons to be depressed! They\u2019d only multiplied throughout his life, culminating in the death of his two little sons and the terrible slaughter of the Civil War. But his melancholia suggested something more, something closer to the medical condition recognized today as clinical, or persistent, irrational depression.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s only in the last few years that researchers have delved into this aspect of Lincoln\u2019s life. A family history of depression, \u201cthe Lincoln horrors.\u201d Lincoln\u2019s own conviction that he was constitutionally subject to melancholy, which he dubbed \u201cmy peculiar misfortune.\u201d His frequent talk of suicide\u2014there was a period when he didn\u2019t dare carry a pocketknife for fear of using it to kill himself. Two major breakdowns, the first in his mid-twenties (the typical onset age for unipolar depression in men), the second in his early thirties.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am now the most miserable man living,\u201d he wrote at age 32. \u201cIf what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would be not one happy face upon the earth.\u201d Concerned friends removed razors from his room, mounted a suicide watch and feared for his sanity.<\/p>\n

In an effort to escape his misery, Lincoln underwent the standard medical treatment of the times\u2014a weeklong torment that would have included starving, bleeding, dunking in icy water, purging with black pepper drinks, swallowing mercury, applying mustard rubs that burned the skin raw. He emerged emaciated, exhausted and, unsurprisingly, feeling worse than ever.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s medicine offers effective drugs and skilled counseling. If these methods had been available then, Lincoln might have been a less sad and tormented person.<\/p>\n

But would he have been as great?<\/p>\n

Here is the life-giving new insight Lincoln is bringing me. Many researchers today, looking afresh at Lincoln\u2019s melancholia, are grateful that he was not <\/em>\u201ccured.\u201d From his chronic depression may have come the coping skills, the realism, the wisdom that steered the nation through its greatest crisis. What strengths may depression have bestowed on our greatest president?<\/p>\n

Humor. <\/em>Jokes and storytelling were Lincoln\u2019s lifelong refuge from despair. As the casualty figures in the war mounted, grief threatened to overwhelm him. Far from a sign of callousness, his humor helped him bear the horrors he felt so deeply. \u201cI laugh,\u201d Lincoln told a disapproving member of his cabinet, \u201cbecause I must not weep.\u201d<\/p>\n

Humility. <\/em>He had the modesty of a man continually aware of his own defects. In an age of swaggerers, this highest official in the land called himself \u201ca man without a name.\u201d Knowing his own failings, he could forgive those of others. As Northern leaders called for continual retribution from the defeated South, Lincoln appealed for \u201cmalice toward none.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dedication to a great cause. <\/em>It was the issue of slavery that pulled Lincoln back from the brink of suicide. Despairing of himself, he determined instead to devote his life to others.<\/p>\n

Dependence on God. <\/em>\u201cI am driven to my knees,\u201d he said, \u201cby the conviction that I have nowhere else to go.\u201d He saw himself not as captain of the ship but as the humble helmsman, striving to steer as the true Captain directed.<\/p>\n

Humor, humility, service to others, faith\u2014these are qualities, I think, that all of us aim at. That it was not despite his depression, but in part because of it, <\/em>that Lincoln\u2019s character developed as it did\u2014this is the wondrous promise he holds out to people like me. His arena was a national one, mine one of family and neighbors. But the fact that God can use the negatives of our lives, even the blackness of depression, to shape us to his purposes\u2014this is good news indeed!<\/p>\n

For more inspiring stories, subscribe to <\/em>Guideposts<\/strong><\/a> magazine<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was my grandfather who gave me a lifelong love of Abraham Lincoln, one that was to help me in a way he could never have imagined. As a boy of seven, Grandfather had seen the funeral train carrying Lincoln\u2019s body home to Springfield, Illinois. 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