Not Happy In His Elder Statesman Role

Ninth of 45 excerpts from Lincoln by David Herbert Donald:

From time to time, Lincoln's behavior suggested that he was not entirely happy in his role of elder statesman. His lackluster speeches during the 1852 presidential campaign came alive only when he referred to Stephen A. Douglas, who was campaigning vigorously for [Franklin] Pierce. . . .

There were other hints of Lincoln's unhappiness. Some days he would arrive at the office in a cheerful mood, but then, as [law partner William] Herndon recorded. he might fall into "a sad terribly gloomy state -- pick up a pen -- sit down by the table and write a moment or two and then become abstracted." Resting his chin on the palm of his left hand, he would sit for hours in silence, staring vacantly at the windows. Other days he was so depressed that he did not even speak to Herndon when he entered the office, and his partner, sensing his mood, would pull the curtain across the glass panel in the door and leave for an hour or so, locking the door behind him to protect the privacy of "this unfortunate and miserable man."

Herndon (photo, below right) attributed Lincoln's melancholy to his domestic unhappiness; others, without about as much evidence, found the cause in his chronic constipation or in the blue-mass pills that he took to overcome it. Perhaps there was truth in all these theories, but they missed the essential point that Lincoln was frustrated and unhappy with a political career that seemed to be going nowhere.

Though he was out of office, he had no intention of being out of the public eye. This was the golden age of the lyceum movement, when men and women thronged lecture halls and listened to hours to speakers who might edify, enlighten, or at least, amuse them. By the 1850s, with the completion of the railroad network, Springfield was on the regular circuit for Eastern lecturers, and residents raptly listened to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, and Bayard Taylor, as well as to numerous local speakers. Lincoln thought he might as well join the parade.

His efforts to become a popular lecturer were uniformly unhappy. His dithyramb on Niagra Falls was probably intended to be part of a lecture before he wisely decided to abandon it. He also aborted a proposed lecture on the law, which he began on a negatives note: "I am not an accomplished lawyer."