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Grapes clover rye potatoes peaches parsnips the piebald pony and the white calf Father’s chair and Mother’s powders rain falling through trees leaves turning silver in the stream mushrooms like fairy houses and Joe’s hands and Ann’s skirts and the color of rocks when they’re wet and lying against the black dogs fur in our fingers and Father in wigs shouting I had a dream which was not all a dream and Mother and Mother and Mother and look! How our sister comes through the forest her arms all filled with flowers.

Lincoln and the Cave of Gloom

Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do,

And this the place to do it:

This heart I’ll rush a dagger through

Though I in hell should rue it!

—Abraham Lincoln on suicide

That same winter, while the Booths are moving to Baltimore, Abraham Lincoln suffers his second nervous breakdown. He’s in his thirties now, a fourth-term state congressman in Illinois, and for the first time, he can’t rouse himself to make his sessions. He feels too heavy to move. His thoughts circle like vultures.

He’s called off his courtship of Mary Todd. Whether this is the result or the cause of his depression is unclear. It would kill me to marry her, he tells his friends. But he knows that people think he’s behaved dishonorably towards her and he’s not certain he hasn’t.

He may be in love with someone else—several of his friends think he’s smitten with the eighteen-year-old daughter of a state senator. She has many such admirers.

He goes to a doctor, seeking medicinal solace. He writes—“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 earth.” He loses weight he can ill afford. His arms and legs are sticks; his clothing flaps about them like flags on poles.

Under pressure from his friend Joshua Speed, he makes a visit to the Speed plantation in Kentucky. On the deck of his boat he encounters twelve Negro men chained together like “fish on a trot-line.” This image will haunt him. Over the years he’ll refer often to these chained men. He’ll see the straitened way they are forced to walk, hear the clank of iron. He understands that they’ve been torn from their families and everyone they love. But in this first encounter, still sunk inside the miasma of his miserable self, what he thinks is that they seem, on the surface, happier than he. He wonders how this could be so.

Joshua Speed fears he’ll take his own life, and begs Lincoln to promise otherwise. Lincoln tells Speed not to worry. He’s not yet done anything to make himself a man worth remembering and he’s determined not to die until he has.

BOOK TWO