An Analytical Biography of a Great Mind- by Edward J. Kempf

introduction

Abraham Lincoln's self-analytical comments, in autobiographical sketches and numerous letters and lectures, provide the humanitarian sciences with invaluable evidence on why and how he reasoned out and applied his philosophical common-sense understanding of the social motivations of human nature and the universal need of maintaining constitutional government by free people to advance their welfare in common with that of the nation.

Common sense is cultivated primarily by thinking consistently, analytically, and logically, to reduce pain and frustration and secondarily to increase success and pleasure in work to live.

Common-sense understanding of sensory experience is recognized in science as the basis of development of realistic, practical, scientific, and philosophical thinking. Informed common sense is the means of evolution of higher levels of intelligence, civilization, and social organization, from primitive self-authorized "gangster" systems of government and tyrannical subjugation and exploitation of defenseless, unorganized people, toward more sympathetic cooperative culture of equality of legal rights and privileges of self-determination. The most understanding humanitarian philosophies of history have been thought out by men with deep sympathetic natures who have experienced bitter suffering with their people under the yoke of legalized privilege and injustice.

Sir William Osler, master physician, has commented in an essay on A Way of Life: "Everyone has a philosophy of life in thought, in word, or in deed, worked out for himself unconsciously ... as it grows with growth."

Abraham Lincoln's philosophy of human nature and human relations developed consciously, purposefully, as well as unconsciously, in a sequence of steps of increasing moral comprehensions and practical realizations. By studiously thinking out self-righting understandings, analytically, ethically, and humorously, of his personal experiences to overcome provocations, by social injustice, of daily repetitive nervous tendencies to diplopia and "melancholy," leading to headache, indigestion, mental distraction, and anxiety, he developed profound understanding of egoistic motivations of himself and other people and extraordinary inspirational moral drive to improve social justice. These personality characterizing compensations followed, as I have shown in a previous publication in the Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry (1952), an accidental injury of his brain in childhood that left him with certain residual disabilities of nervous functioning.

This book presents an analytical study of the decisive experiences and steps in the development of Lincoln's understanding of human nature and his common-sense philosophy of ethical personal relations in love, law, and political organization, as shown by authentic records of what he did, said, and wrote, up to becoming president and as president of the United States.

When Abraham Lincoln was persuaded by his law partner, W. H. Herndon, to read a new book on the life of Edmund Burke, he glanced through some of its pages for several minutes and then commented: "No sir. I've read enough of it. It is like all the others. Biographies, as generally written, are not only misleading but false.... In most instances they commemorate a lie and cheat posterity of the truth."

We have taken Lincoln at his word and given only thoroughly checked and verified information on the noble and beautiful and crude and vulgar thoughts and acts of his life in their provocative environmental situations for their natural psychobiodynamic worth, regardless of popular prejudices and idealizing legends of martyred hero worship now being cultivated. The following analytical biography is frank, factual, and humanly realistic. Its presentation is not intentionally sentimental and romantic. Its material is naturally so, for Lincoln was a person of deep sentiments, attachments, and convictions, and his life was involved in an unusual series of romantic and tragic experiences that led eventually to gloomy triumphs and fateful death.

Biographies differentiate into three types: popular, historical, and analytical. The popular type is written by skillful romancers to satisfy the preferences and prejudices of an easy reading public. It usually includes a series of glowing accounts of the more important situations in the life of the subject with selected excerpts of such of his productions as will excite popular admiration. The result is entertaining superficial reading about the life of an unusual person as the writer would have him known. Popular eulogizing of the tragic hero in America is producing, as it has myths and legends of the heroes of other nations, portraits in monuments, books, movies, and plays of Lincoln which cultivate many false ideas about him as a man. By reading selected epigrammatic passages from his expressions, most American people have no realistic understanding of how Lincoln's mind developed and how carefully, thoroughly and consistently he labored to master personal, physical, educational, legal, and political deficiencies and to think out basic principles of human behavior as a boy, young man, legislator, lawyer, and leader of freedom loving people.

Historical biography gives more reliable and extensive accounts from existing records of the economic, political, and other social conditions in which the subject lived and his reactions to them and influence upon them, the purpose largely of establishing his place in history. Such bilography is not primarily interested in the psychodynamics of experience--conditioning development of the subject's personality, ideas, convictions, and unconscious determinants of conscious volitional reasoning. All previous biographies of Lincoln, other than the psychoanalytical study by Pierce Clark, are either popular or historical in type.

Analytical biography is a recent scientific development evolving from the combined discoveries of psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology, physiology, genetics, biology, and medical practice, on the natural determinations of human behavior. No man's mind is the product of free-will selections of experience-detached knowledge and abstract reasoning, as long erroneously assumed by academic, religious, and popular psychology. Mental development is the product of hereditary endowment and bodily growth, reacting in a natural sequence of stages and pyramiding levels of self-righting, self-expressive, self-understanding egocentric organization, to the conditioning influences of climate and nutrition, and cultures of interactions of needs, desires, attitudes, habits, speech, work, demands, approvals, condemnations, and beliefs in the family, school, community, and nation.

Unlike the popular and historical biographer, the analytical biographer must have sufficient psychiatric and psychoanalytic, as well as general medical, psychological, and sociological experience, to recognize and correlate the major social characteristics of his subject's personality. These must include basic inborn aptitudes and repetitive autonomic pressures of emotional cravings and energy of drives for developing more effective and pleasurable self-expression in creative work toward achieving greater self-realization of being a desired, respected, and influential person by his social group. Thereby he most enjoys self-respect with social respectability and peace of mind.

Analytical biography correlates the natural sequences of particular stages and levels of concomitant development of personality with body, under particular experience-conditioning environmental excitations and inhibitions of particular forms of acquisitive and avoidance behavior. It must show the steps in sequence of formation of the subject's characteristic egoistic-social attitudes, in interaction with such attitudes of particular persons-cooperatively to acquire and give particular pleasurable exchanges of sympathetic work-easing appeals, approvals, praises and rewards, and competitively to avoid and to give antipathic work-increasing demands, disapprovals, condemnations, and punishments.

It must show how such social experiences have conditioned particular allied and conflicting acquisitive and avoidance compulsions and convictions of what to think and do and what not to think and do, in order to be justified as morally right and good and not be condemned as wrong and evil. It must show how these socially conditioned egoistic biases continue to act unconsciously, involitionally, and influence conscious volitional thinking throughout childhood, adolescence, and maturity in a pyramiding series of levels of mental organization. It must show how such fixed conditioned reactions, when too much alike and excited in conflicting ways in unavoidable situations, under decreasing limitations of time and increasing danger of failure and punishment, produce indecision with tendency to progressive split mindedness, illogical thinking, and anxiety with depression or rage. Thereby analytical biography is able to take any egoistic reaction pattern of a person and reversely trace its conditioning steps in development back to its earliest formative experiences. Thus we can learn to understand the sequences of development and compulsive consistencies and contradictions of a person's behavior and foreknow what he will probably do in equivalent situations in the future.

Analytical biography is written for the serious student of human nature and human relations, the psychologist, sociologist, and anthropologist, the physician, lawyer, judge, editor, commentator, teacher, minister, politician, and dramatist, and the general reader who wants to be realistically and not sentimentally informed about a particular person and human nature in general. The analytical understanding of the endless pressures of equilibrating against disequilibrating interactions of egotistic attitudes between persons in their daily cooperative and competitive interests is now emerging as a dynamic science of human behavior. It will eventually become man's most enlightening contribution to understanding the greater development of his mind, his interpersonal interactions, and social organizations.

An analytical biography of a man like Lincoln, which would cover the development of his understanding of human nature and political organization, as he worked out his principles and policies in interaction with the social conditions of his time, must have a universal cultural frame of reference. His political philosophy has aroused international as well as national interest. He is now recognized by historians as our greatest, most influential president. He has become, within less than 100 years, the subject of more biographical volumes and papers and more editorial and oratorical commentaries and quotations in more languages than any statesman in history. This interest is profoundly revolutionary. It reveals irrepressible human needs and desires to understand Lincoln's philosophy of human nature, human relations, and national social organization.

Lincoln's propositions and applications of the principle of divine right to self-government with equalitarian legal rights to justice for all persons, regardless of race, creed, political office, social class, wealth, or education, continue to be discussed and advocated by religious and political organizations in every civilized land. They assert the fundamental needs and aspirations of the individual person to live respectably in freedom of ethical self-expression and self-determination, to be the divinely intended natural moral foundation of the integrity of the human mind and of democratic government. They deny the ancient unilateral assumption of divine right of kings and hereditary or self-established ruling classes to govern without the free consent of the governed.

Lincoln's humanitarian statements include less well known basic psychological and sociological as well as better known political principles. They are consistent with the moral cultures of Mosaic law, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity. He often referred to his principles as his "philosophy," and in this application of the term he was correct. It is indeed applied wisdom in consistent psychological, moral, and political arguments expressed in numerous speeches, lectures, notes, stories, and letters. It is a philosophy built on the common-sense realizations of natural truths of human behavior rather than interpretations of so-called divine revelations. Such truths have accumulated through the ages by analytical observations of many minds to reduce suffering and improve the practical culture of more equitable social relations, toward the greater cooperative development of the individual and the people with greater organization of the state. They are now being analyzed and applied by the sciences of living behavior.

The political philosophy of Abraham Lincoln has contributed effectively practical, equitable applications of analytically informed, sympathetic common sense to the natural political organization of human interactions in everyday life under guarantees of equalitarian rights of freedom of constitutional government. Before Lincoln's presidency the meaning of the Constitution of the United States on federal versus state sovereign rights, and the powers conferred by it on the president, on Congress, on the Supreme Court, and the people, were confused by two opposed cultural interpretations of human needs and rights, completely equalitarian and racially unilateral. The indissoluble solidarity of federal government based on inviolable contracts between states, majority rule with consideration and not suppression of dissenting minorities, the emancipation of mankind as morally and legally possessing personal rights above property rights, and the need for legal restriction of power and privilege inherent in monopoly, have become under his leadership and teaching, essential to the democratic way of life in America.

Most biographers seem to have regarded Lincoln's unusual personal characteristics and unique expressions of political philosophy as the free-willed product of enigmatic genius. Important studies have been published with selected excerpts of his productions and accounts of stimulating situations by Herndon, Lamon, Davis, Raymond, Barton, Tarbell, Charnwood, Stephenson, Masters, Clark, Sandburg, Angle, Randall, Thomas, and many others. No biography of Lincoln, however, has presented a basically realistic understanding of the psychobiodynamics of the man's mental development, for no one suspected, until I found the evidence, that Lincoln's brain had been injured in childhood, leaving residual impairments of certain highly necessary nervous functions that had been counterbalanced by developing special volitional compensations, repeated constantly to maintain normal mental integrity. Conditioning formative effects of the utmost importance on his personality and philosophical view of life by certain experiences in his childhood, adolescence, and manhood are not even mentioned in the most important biographies, although he described them self-analytically and told them to friends to indicate their influence on his mind.

Abraham Lincoln's personality and facial expression were often said to have had certain enigmatical qualities of unfathomable mystery, by such important observers and students of his life as his close political and business friends and neighbors who knew him personally. At times his inner personal, visual, emotional, and mental experiences were as deeply puzzling to himself. The great sculptors and painters of Lincoln's face have not understood the profoundly significant meaning of its endlessly sad, divergent eyes and gloomy expression, covered by earnest and humorous but diffident tensions of volitional self-control. Of these artists only Gutzon Borglum seems to have intuitively sensed that the left side of Lincoln's face was for some reason, unknown to him, mentally less active and developed than the right.*

This personal dualism interested me greatly and, while modeling, about 12 years ago, a portrait of Lincoln from the 1860 life mask by Volk and numerous photographs, my professional training as a psychiatrist led me, from the differences in measurements of his eyes and the right and left sides of his face, and the growth of the facial bones on each side, to the conclusion that he had been functionally embarrassed and disconcerted throughout life, by the nervous after-effects of a serious injury of his brain in childhood. Investigation produced evidence from Lincoln's own statement, given fully later, that accounts for the injury. When nine years old he had been kicked in the forehead by a horse and "thought dead for awhile."*

The nature of the cerebral damage and how it influenced the development of his personality and mind, hence public career, became then a question of absorbing interest. Extensive reading of the more important biographies showed that, although the accident was generally known, it was ignored, and injury of the brain had never been suspected. When I found that practically all of the evidence on the life of Lincoln, when properly correlated and evaluated, revealed the endlessly gloomy effect of nervous and emotional instability on his mind, and how he analyzed and disciplined himself to overcome it, thereby developing the most salutary understanding in history of human nature, human relations, and social organization, I felt obliged to present an account of this profoundly important achievement in an analytical biography.

That Lincoln's cerebral condition was never recognized by his personal physicians is understandable, since he received no medical aid after the injury in the wilderness of southern Indiana, and little was known in his time of the physiology of the brain. Some recent medical observers have suggested that Lincoln's facial asymmetry developed possibly through habitually making voluntary efforts to correct a congenital strabismus. The marked differences in the muscular tonus of the two sides of his face seem to have been regarded superficially by most of his friends and biographers as an oddity of habitual expression. Although his keenly observing law partner and biographer, W. H. Herndon, has said from repeated observation that Lincoln's gloomy sadness seemed to have "organic and functional" causes, the cerebral basis of his neurosis was never recognized by any of his medical biographers, including such eminent physicians as Holt (1910), Hornell (1914), Clark (1933), Shutes (1933), and Wold (1948).*

Collection of physical evidence on the cerebral injury has been a relatively simple task, but the correlation of personal and social evidence, showing how it affected, with other conditioning experiences, the development of his personality, self-understanding, and philosophy of human relations, has been far more complex, requiring a complete study, in order of development, of all of his extant publications with the most reliable collateral evidence as provided by numerous biographers.

It will be confirmed by recorded evidence in the following chapters that Lincoln, as a man from his late twenties until his death, hence no doubt since the cerebral injury in childhood, had a hypersensitive, involitionally unstable nervous system that was aggravated by increasing strain of diplopia under emotional stress and fatigue, to augment a daily tendency to gloomy visual consciousness. These nervous reactions tended to become incapacitating when excited by certain kinds of unjust accusations and frustrations that discredited his self-respect and moral integrity. His melancholic disposition was also conditioned by regressive, nostalgic fixations of love for the memories of a certain childhood pet and for certain persons who had tragic deaths under similar conditions of fateful determination.

This organic and emotionally conditioned vicious circle was always potentially disposed to become active, and when aroused it tended to last for a day to several weeks. It will be shown how, three times, under fateful conditions involving hopeless frustration of love, Lincoln developed extreme anxiety and dangerous depression. It will be shown how, consistently with these reactions, he interpreted a certain experience of double vision of his face and some of his dreams, as the occult presentiment of fateful destiny. It will also become evident why he sensed intuitively that he would carry on the work he most loved, promotion of equalitarian legal rights and justice for all mankind, and that his life would end in tragedy as had the lives of those he most loved.

The evidence will show that Lincoln was born with a superior hereditary intellectual and constitutional endowment from unusual grandparents, for developing self-reliantly an intelligent mind. It will show how he learned as a child to make the most of his natural propensity to question causes of events in everyday life that interested him, so that he could not only understand them but describe them logically and convincingly to other people. We will see how his natural method of self-education, under the encouragement of maternal interest, though opposed by paternal prejudice, but free of the intense dogmas of badly informed teachers, led to the development of a mind that gave as full consideration as possible to the pros and cons of issues and propositions, to learn truth and reality. It will be seen how Lincoln learned never entirely to close his mind to the possibility of changes occurring in the relative values of causes and effects nor to develop a conviction beyond peradventure of doubt, except in certain supreme situations, lest some unknown condition or unforeseen contingency might arise and make his beliefs and decisions erroneous and unjustifiable and increase gloomy feelings of moral frustration. The common-sense method of equilibrating logically and mathematically reasoning from experience and evidence to tentative conclusions, as consistently developed by young Lincoln, is the method effectively adopted by the modern scientific mind as so profoundly applied by Darwin in biology and Newton and Einstein in physics.

Lincoln worked all his life to overcome the effects of his neuropsychopathological vicious circle without ever freeing himself from them. His own statements will show how he needed to feel that he was being right and kind in order to avoid being "melancholy," and how he cultivated intentionally, to maintain better self-control, a calm, cautious, good humored, patient, and thoroughly just and conscientious attitude to overcome emotions aroused by the trials and stresses of everyday life. They also show how he developed practical analytic insight into the ways of the self- and socially interested ego leading to cultivation constantly of a common-sense philosophy of human relations. It will be seen how he compensated against his endlessly regressive tendency to become distracted and how he improved his memory and powers of self-expression by reading aloud each day in order to better mentally visualize and auditize the meanings of what he read. It will be shown in his words why, daily, he needed to seek sympathetic communications with friends who enjoyed trading humorous stories about the frustrations of egotism, so that he could enjoy laughing with them and overcome his melancholic disposition.

Since few people know that, besides his legal and political speeches, he wrote and lectured on such important psychological subjects as the egocentric interests of the personality and its political ambitions, on friendship, wit, the treatment of alcoholism, and on the economic and political implications of inventions, railroads, canals, agriculture, and slave labor, and capital and labor, we present them fully. Since few people know that Lincoln was a deeply nostalgic poet, we present his more characteristic works and show how his emotional attachments developed and influenced him in his immortal expressions of sentiment on human relations. He was an exceptionally well informed student of the Bible and of Shakespeare, of Aesop, Bunyan, Washington, Jefferson, Clay, Webster, and other great humanitarian moralists, and it will be shown how these sources of wisdom influenced his philosophy of human nature, law, and social organization.

Lincoln's realization of the importance of free egoistic self-determination for the healthy organization of mind under equalitarian rights of sympathetic social cooperation and competition preceded modern realizations of these functions by many years. His practical advice on the psychotherapy of alcoholism and other psychopathological frustrations, as suggested in his lectures presented later in full, preceded by 100 years similar methods being applied today in the best psychiatric institutions. In the knowledge of modern psychology, Lincoln's philosophy of human nature and human relations is far more fundamental than Freud's theory of mental development and social organization through repression of forbidden sexual desires.

The most significant letters, notes, poems, speeches, papers, and authentic stories, inclusive of his life through childhood, youth, and maturity up to and through his presidency, are presented in categorical orders to give in appropriate sequences his hard earned improvements in humanitarian wisdom. His speeches often express similar ideas and feelings in different ways to different audiences. They show, better than any other evidence, Lincoln's genius for understanding people and expressing himself so that they would understand him. He did this naturally, as he would tell the same story in different ways to different people so that they would react with enjoyment of its wit.
Only by reading Lincoln's commentaries fully, in correlation with established evidence on the interpersonal, political and, other social situations that stimulated them, can we obtain an intimate feeling and realistic understanding and appreciation of the development of the personality, mind, and philosophy of the man as he lived.

In Chapter I the best established evidence on Lincoln's physical constitution as a matured man is presented to show in detail the compensatory after-effects of the injury of his brain in childhood. This is the man as known by his contemporaries before and during his presidency. The following chapters portray the development of his mind. In Chapter II is given his family history with a view to accounting for his unusual hereditary mental endowment. In Chapters III to VI are presented the personalities of Lincoln's parents and their influences on the development of his personality in childhood and youth. Lincoln's statements revealing belief in the honesty of his mother and his moral sensitivity about the promiscuity of her relatives, and his conviction that he was the legitimate son of Thomas Lincoln, and why he respected his father's honesty and hated his tyranny are adequately accounted for with additional evidence so correlated for the first time in any biography. How he educated himself as a boy and worked out a method of cross checking the pros and cons of his information and reasoning for truth and reality, that later established him as a superior lawyer, statesman, and president, is given with impressive experiences as he related them.

Chapter VII portrays his life as a young man in New Salem, Ill., and Chapter VIII presents the best evidence known on his tragic romance with Ann Rutledge. It indicates how the encouraging admiration of this lovely, intelligent, virtuously idealistic granddaughter of a signer of the Declaration of Independence and grandniece of a founder of the Constitution of the United States, for Lincoln's ability as a debater, inspired him to decide not to become a blacksmith, as he had contemplated, but to study law and politics and uphold to the best of his ability the intent of the founders of the Constitution of the United States. Chapters IX and X give his important experiences as a crude but apt young lawyer, legislator, and politician and his neurotic courtship of Mary Owens.

In Chapter XI he meets for the first time Stephen A. Douglas, the man who will have more critical influence on his life, political career, and philosophy of democracy, up to the presidency, than any other person. In Chapter XII are presented Lincoln's ideas on the importance of friendship and his neurotic rivalry with Douglas in the courtship of Mary Todd. Chapters XIII and XIV give, in Lincoln's words, accounts of the sympathetic but neurotic dependence of two bachelors on each other and how he talked Joshua Speed into marrying Fanny Henning and then eventually talked Speed into talking himself into marrying Mary Todd.

Chapter XV gives Lincoln's nostalgic poetry and shows how this deeply fixed mood influenced his philosophy of living. Chapters XVI, XVII, and XVIII follow him through Congress and his discouraging failures as a politician. In Chapters XIX and XX Lincoln's philosophy as an eminent lawyer is presented with his most famous cases and what his more intimate contemporaries thought of him. Chapter XX I portrays him as a family man and analyzes his expressions of loyalty to his aging stepmother and management of a moody old father and undependable stepbrother, and his sympathetic interest in maternal as well as paternal relatives.

Chapters XXII to XLII give accounts, largely in Lincoln's own words, of his revival of interest in politics and his uncompromising opposition to the policies of Senator Douglas that would extend states' rights to slavery in the western territories. They show how he envied Douglas more than any other man and how the Lincoln-Douglas rivalries and debates in law and politics, which began in Speed's store in Springfield some 20 years before their political race in 1858 for election to the United States Senate, were resumed. They show how Douglas generally dominated him in winning public approvals in debates and state and national politics, and how Lincoln's envious inferiority influenced him in opposing the national political ambitions of Douglas until he finally defeated him for the presidency of the United States in 1860.

The personal and political conflicts between Lincoln and Douglas constitute the most dramatic romance of obsessive jealousy of human nature and its fateful political consequences in American history, if not world history. Although the major part of the record is largely presented in the chronological order of its development in Lincoln's words, many of Douglas' critical replies to Lincoln are given in his words.

Chapters XLIII and XLIV give Lincoln's reasoning on the selection of his cabinet to solve the intricate political problem that confronted him as president-elect when the southern states seceded and organized the Confederacy. Chapter XLV gives his astute efforts to convince the divided, confused people of the northern and southern states that they must preserve the Union as an indissoluble constitutional contract between states. Chapter XLVI presents his appeal for peace in his inaugural address. Here it will be seen how the jealous rivalry in love and politics between Lincoln and Douglas reached its dramatic climax during the inaugural address and the amazing sequel of the grand march of the inaugural ball.

Chapter XLVII presents the grounds for Lincoln's philosophy of administration of democratic government. Chapter XLVIII shows how he met crises, and XLIX presents his justifications of suppression of rebellion. Chapter L treats his administration of unprecedented civil involvements of military suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Chapters LI and LII cover Lincoln's military strategy in 1861-62, and Chapter LIII gives the dilemmas of emancipation. Chapters LIV and LV give his letters and addresses as statesman and emancipator in 1863. Chapter LVI presents his military strategy in 1863, LVII the trials of reconstruction in 1864, LVIII his military strategy of 1864, and LIX covers his final political and military triumphs and tragic death. Chapter LX describes his private life as President and LXI that of Mrs. Lincoln after his death. Chapter LX II discusses his philosophy of morals and religion.

He who has learned to read Lincoln studiously comes to enjoy the growth of his wisdom and literary style as one does the development of the music of great masters. As one reads his productions again and again, appreciation grows for his severe cultivation of clarity, simplicity, economy, beauty, and depth of expression of humanitarian sympathies with meticulous choice of words. He who would like to understand the processes involved in the development of Lincoln's personality, mind, and philosophy will obtain the best understanding by reading his letters, papers, notes, and speeches in the chronological order as presented.

Besides the members of Lincoln's boyhood family, five persons, Ann Rutledge, Joshua Speed, Mary Todd, Stephen A. Douglas, and William H. Herndon, had unusually impressive influences on his life up to the presidency. Of these, Stephen A. Douglas was by far the most critically important and determinative. Brief biographical sketches of these people are inserted in the chapters where they enter the scene in order that the reader will better grasp the nature of their personal influences on Lincoln's mind.

Collections of Lincoln's written or otherwise recorded productions as known at the time of publication have been presented by Raymond (1865), Nicolay and Hay (1890), Hertz (1931), Basler (1949), and The Abraham Lincoln Association (1953). The last has become, through the meticulous research of collateral recorded material, and the correction of former misinformation and erroneous statements and the elimination of false documents, by an organization of highly competent scholars, editors and librarians, under the supervision of Roy P. Basler, editor of Rutgers University Press, the most authoritative and complete presentation of Lincoln's productions. This Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln is accepted here as authentic and his letters, notes, and speeches and spelling are quoted from it.

Abstracts from editorial comments and notes in the Collected Works, made with reference to particular situations relative to particular letters or speeches of Lincoln, have been added at the time of quotation where they provided interesting information, and I am most indebted to the Collected Works for such collateral information. Other material on Lincoln is credited to the source as used. Extensive correlation of material from many contemporary and later biographies and historical records has been made, in order to present as accurate and complete an account as possible of the most important conditioning physical and social factors in the development of Lincoln's personality and philosophy.

I am particularly indebted to the late Dr. John F. Fulton, former Sterling Professor of Physiology at Yale University Medical School, and Dr. Henry A. Riley, Professor of Clinical Neurology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, for their kindly assistance in interpreting the facial evidence of Lincoln's cerebral injury and its possible pathology. I am, however, responsible for the diagnosis as presented.

The photographs of Lincoln have been selected to show the facial evidence of the organic neurosis and the changes in his face and character with age and work. A photograph of Volk's life mask of Lincoln (1860) in my possession is presented to show the depression in his forehead produced by the old injury. The life mask of President Lincoln by Mills (1864) has been added for comparison.

I have taken the liberty of including, at the request of friends who are interested in this study, a photograph of myself with my sculpture of president-elect Lincoln, in which I tried to portray the inspired, resolutely moral, but diffident, kindly humored prophet of fraternalism who would fight to establish equal legal rights for all mankind and to preserve the Constitution and the Union.

Because of the specialized method of presenting the study of Lincoln's personal development I have relied mostly on the assistance of Dorothy Clarke Kempf, my wife, who is also a physician and specialist in psychiatry. For a thousand and one invaluable discriminating literary criticisms and editorial suggestions in preparing the manuscript I am immeasurably indebted to her. Without her help I could not have written this book.

I wish to extend my thanks in particular to the following publishers and authors for my abstractions and quotations of material from special publications bearing on the life of Lincoln which have been essential sources of information for this biographical analysis: to the World Publishing Co., from Herndon's Life of Lincoln; to The Viking Press, Inc., from The Hidden Lincoln by Emanuel Hertz, to Horace Liveright & Co, from Abraham Lincoln, A New, Portrait by Emanuel Hertz; to Rutgers University Press, from The Lincoln Reader by Paul M. Angle; to Alfred A. Knopf, from Abraham Lincoln by Benjamin P.Thomas;to McClure Co.,from The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz,to Houghton Mifflin Co., from The Real Lincoln by Jesse W. Weik, and The Diary of Gideon Welles; to Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., from Mar ' Lincoln by Carl Sandburg and Paul M. Angle; to Dodd, Mead & Co., from Lincoln the President by J. G. Randall; to Little, Brown & Co., from Mary Lincoln by Ruth Painter Randall; and to Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., from The West Point Atlas of the Civil War by V. T. Esposito.

I am also particularly indebted to the Department of Lincolniana, Lincoln Memorial University, to the McClellan Lincoln Collection in Brown University Library, to Louis A. Warren, Director of the Lincoln National Life Foundation, and to the Library of Congress and the Illinois State Historical Library for special points of information and for photographs of Lincoln, Mrs. Lincoln, Douglas, and their contemporaries, and to The American Museum of Natural History and H. C. Shapiro and Clarence L. Hay for anthropological notes and reproductions of Mills' life mask of Lincoln from Natural History.

To Mrs. Eunice Thomas Miner, Executive Director of The New York Academy of Sciences I feel particularly grateful for her interest and encouragement in publishing this book as a contribution to the new social science of analytical biography, and to Editors Harold E. Whipple, Marvin I. Spitzer and Mary Louise Byrd for numerous suggestions in improving the manuscript.

*Dr. Frechette's emphasis

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