Lincoln's Battle with God Quotes

“Take all of this book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier and better man.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Lincoln's Battle with God: A President's Struggle with Faith and What It Meant for America

“A second legacy from Nancy might seem more a curse than a gift, but it may have helped to give us the Lincoln our nation reveres. She would pass on to him her own struggle with depression, with that enveloping darkness that lurks, for some, ever at the soul’s door. This would merge with a Lincoln family heritage of mental illness to become a force in Abraham that he fought to subdue all his days. It would leave him scarred, and it would even deform parts of his personality, but by striving to master it and by remembering what he had experienced in those hours of suffocating gloom, he emerged a man of greater wisdom, wit, and humanity.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Lincoln's Battle with God: A President's Struggle with Faith and What It Meant for America

“Nonetheless, Lincoln’s story is, in part, that of a man who beat back the spirits that came for him in the night. He might well have been crushed by his woes, by the death of the first son and then the second, by the madness of his wife, or the hatred of his foes—even by the devils in his thoughts. He did not yield, though, not ultimately. As important, he mined the valleys of depression for what riches he could find. He emerged to see life differently from other men, to understand and feel as though he were looking in from outside of human existence. For that is what depression is—a way of seeing and feeling life as though from another, tormented world.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Lincoln's Battle with God: A President's Struggle with Faith and What It Meant for America

“Abraham Lincoln avoided the extremes of his family’s psychological deformities, but he still suffered from a dark, draining, despair-inducing force that seemed at times to bore into the center of his being. Shortly after Lincoln’s death, Herndon described his slain friend as “a sad looking man: his melancholy dripped from him as he walked.”17 Townspeople reported that he was indeed the saddest-looking man they had ever known. Lincoln’s friends stood what we now call “suicide watch”more than once, and Lincoln himself said that he was careful not to carry a pocketknife lest he sink into a depression—his word for it was hypo—and harm himself. 18 During one episode of his life, he reported, “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 forbode I shall”
― Stephen Mansfield, Lincoln's Battle with God: A President's Struggle with Faith and What It Meant for America

“A second legacy from Nancy might seem more a curse than a gift, but it may have helped to give us the Lincoln our nation reveres. She would pass on to him her own struggle with depression, with that enveloping darkness that lurks, for some, ever at the soul’s door. This would merge with a Lincoln family heritage of mental illness to become a force in Abraham that he fought to subdue all his days. It would leave him scarred, and it would even deform parts of his personality, but by striving to master it and by remembering what he had experienced in those hours of suffocating gloom, he emerged a man of greater wisdom, wit, and humanity. It was said by those who knew Nancy that her life was “beclouded by a spirit of sadness.”13 Herndon, Lincoln’s friend, law partner, and biographer, wrote that her face “was marked with an expression of melancholy which fixed itself in the memory of everyone who ever saw or knew her.”14 It is tempting to believe that this was simply fruit of the life she led. It was true she passed most of her days in bleak frontier settlements, the wife of an unsympathetic man and chained to mindless, soul-numbing work. Sandburg wrote that when she died, she had only “memories of monotonous, endless everyday chores.”15 Then, too, there was the lifelong cloud of her illegitimacy. Lesser burdens were known to drive some frontier women insane. But something darker, more ominous, tortured her, and it was more than what we now call “the”
― Stephen Mansfield, Lincoln's Battle with God: A President's Struggle with Faith and What It Meant for America

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affections. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Lincoln's Battle with God: A President's Struggle with Faith and What It Meant for America

“The theme of the next sentence is the heart of his message: “The Almighty has His own purposes.” This is what Lincoln believed now, and why he thought the war had taken the course it had. Events were not ruled by North or South—even their prayers were not fully answered, he admitted—but the war had unfolded according to the purposes of God. This because men do not contend with myth or principle or an absent sovereign, as Lincoln once believed. Instead, there was a God, a divine person, who ruled nations—and he was, as the preachers said, offended with America.”
― Stephen Mansfield, Lincoln's Battle with God: A President's Struggle with Faith and What It Meant for America