How Depression can Foster Effective Leadership — Lincoln and Empathy
Among scholarly consensus and public opinion polls, Abraham Lincoln is consistently ranked as the greatest president in the history of the United States. He successfully directed the most perilous crisis our country had ever faced, and his leadership during the American Civil War is one of the finest blueprints that one can turn to for effective executive management. He was a compassionate, brilliant, moral, and empathetic leader who brought about “the rebirth of a union free of slavery,” and ensured that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” During his presidency, from 1861–1865, he imbued the nation with a strong new sense of moral purpose and purged our original sin of slavery. He was able to accomplish these goals through powerful resolve, strength of character, brilliance, and an extraordinary sense of empathy. That sense of empathy gave Lincoln the ability to understand the minds, hearts, and motivations of those around him. It guided his meteoric political rise from absolute poverty, his wartime leadership, and his moral infusion of abolition, morality, and spiritualism into the Union war effort. Lincoln’s unrivaled empathy was cultivated through extreme crucibles of loss of loved ones and bouts of mental illness. His story of managing those crucibles and his mental illness can serve as a tremendously positive lesson for all of us who are going through or have gone through tough times.
Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in Kentucky. The cabin had a dirt floor, and his father was illiterate. No one would have imagined that he would eventually become president of the United States during his childhood. His childhood, youth, and manhood would be marked by continual loss, mental illness, melancholy, and his ultimately positive responses to those obstacles. At the young age of nine, Lincoln lost his mother to “milk sickness,” a sickness marked by “dizziness, nausea, and an irregular heartbeat before slipping into a coma.” At 19, Lincoln lost his best friend and older sister Sarah. She died during childbirth. This early experience with the loss of his closest family members enabled Lincoln to empathize with the great suffering of others during his presidency and empowered him to better manage public sentiment and the war. It was a matter of resilience, perception, and drive that enabled Lincoln to grow from his experiences rather than being broken by them.
During his early manhood, Lincoln lost his “first and perhaps most passionate love,” Ann Rutledge to “a deadly fever, possibly typhoid.” He became “temporarily deranged” and his worldview, devoid of religion in his early life, turned increasingly to the importance of sustaining the life of the dead through memory. That philosophy fueled his ruthless ambition to accomplish worthy deeds, and also strengthened his empathy by continual remembrance of feelings towards those he had lost. As a young Illinois legislator, Lincoln experienced massive political defeats and the “dissolution of his engagement” to his fiancé, Mary Todd. This, possibly supplemented by his prior hardships, sent him into his first major depressive episode. He socially isolated himself and his friends had to remove sharp objects and knives from his living space as Lincoln began to experience suicidal ideation. He had hit the lowest point in his life, and the only thing that pulled him up was his undying resolve to not die having “done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.” Lincoln’s confrontation and eventual management of his powerful, nearly overwhelming personal demons strengthened him in hindsight. He threw himself into his work to pull himself out of his slump. Managing his depression, rooted in both tremendous loss and possible genetic predisposition, allowed him to primally understand the suffering of others. That understanding sharpened his empathetic leadership ability, and serves to show us all the growth we can achieve at our lowest moments.
After Lincoln became president in 1861, Lincoln would have a final brush with great personal loss before he attained his greatest achievements. In the February of 1862, Lincoln’s son, Willie, “came down with a fever.” His other son, Tad, also became sick. They likely suffered from “typhoid fever…caused by the unsanitary conditions in Washington.” Willie died on February 20. In the face of this catastrophic loss, Lincoln could now intimately relate with the profound sadness of most of the country, who had lost family members to the war. He later asked a nurse who has tending to Tad about her life. Upon learning that she “was a widow and had lost two children…he began to cry, both for her and for his own stricken family.” A great storm arose during Willie’s funeral proceedings, perhaps a portent of this final emotional crucible that Lincoln passed through before his greatest acts.
Three documents in particular (two of which were speeches) illuminate Lincoln’s ability to infuse morality, abolition, and spiritualism into the public sentiment and war effort: The Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, and his second inaugural speech. As the craftsman of these documents, Lincoln wrote with precision, delicacy, and great understanding of the people he led. Those traits were amplified by his personal losses in life.
Lincoln, a lifelong advocate of the immorality of slavery, had become morally convinced that he must pursue its abolition in the later stages of the war. He moved carefully to guide public opinion before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, issuing a public letter saying that he would save the Union “without freeing any slave” or “freeing all the slaves” if he could. The next month, having softened moderate public opinion through his letter, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a legalistic document freeing all slaves in the states in rebellion based on his war powers. Despite its lack of moral flair, the proclamation morally “changed the course of the war” by providing the momentum to make freeing the slaves the second Union war aim (the first was simply to reunite the Confederacy with the Union.) The president recalled “the suicidal depression he had suffered two decades earlier,” and now believed he could die having achieved greatness; the fact that Lincoln recalled this symptom immediately after the great event hints that he was still very effectively managing his own depression. Abolition was confirmed as an explicit war aim by the Republican National Convention in 1864.
As the chief executive responsible for the deaths of over 800,000 Union soldiers, Lincoln came to believe that the Civil War represented “a divine will at work in human affairs.” The enormity of the whole conflict couldn’t make sense to Lincoln otherwise; there had to be a preordained moral and spiritual purpose to it all. Increasingly, he came to see that moral purpose to be abolition. That theme would pervade his two most famous speeches, written and delivered with enormous empathy and concision. In the brief, two-minute Gettysburg Address, Lincoln punctuated his remarks with this sense of moral infusion, “that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that, government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Lincoln’s second inaugural address powerfully asserts that abolition was the spiritual purpose of the Civil War, stating that God had forced war between the North and South due to their shared original sin of slavery, and that “if God wills that it continue…until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the swords…so still it must be said that ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.” But Lincoln also encouraged mercy, appealing to the “better angels of our nature” through his finishing 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.” In the final year of the war, Lincoln wanted the public to only think of peace, mercy, and compassion. “More than any of his other speeches, the Second Inaugural fused spiritual faith with politics.”
In achieving victory in the Civil War, Lincoln attained the greatest achievement of any American president except maybe Washington, who established it. But Lincoln did more than establish a republic. He durably infused morality into America through his sentimental and empathetic leadership. He eliminated our original sin, creating the requisite momentum for establishment of the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery. He redefined America and republics for the world. No longer would the light of liberty bear a hypocritical stain. He was able to do so because he was truly in touch with the hearts and minds of everyday Americans. His capacity for empathy, earned through extreme hardship and loss, was immense.
We should look to Lincoln as an example when we pass through difficult periods of our lives, when we experience major loss, or even when our mental health is in a state of deterioration that we need to rise up from and control or at least manage. We can learn more about ourselves from these experiences. We can grow stronger from these experiences. These experiences can make, not break, us. They can, but we have to have the will to make our crucibles into growth opportunities. To do so is an active choice that Lincoln made, and one that we can make as well. Let’s choose to grow.
P.S. Source documents for this story are Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals and numerous primary sources from Lincoln and his contemporaries.
Matt Lively is an aspiring popular historian, to see his upcoming posts about history and future publications, you can subscribe to his blog here. He is launching his first book this September. Subscribe to be among the first to receive a free copy!
