In 1997, Richard Lawrence Miller discovered an 1838 poem in the Sangama Journal of Springfield, Illinois, titled “the Suicide’s Soliloquy” which some historians believe can be attributed to President Abraham Lincoln. After poring over the text, he concluded that it was indeed Lincoln’s work, noting that the meter, syntax, diction, and tone was consistent with Lincoln’s other works. Convinced of its authenticity, Miller announced his discovery in a 2004 newsletter published by the Abraham Lincoln Association. The Suicide Soliloquy reads as follows:

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!
Sweet steel! Come forth from out your sheath,
And glist’ning, speak your powers;
Rip up the organs of my breath,
And draw my blood in showers!

I strike! It quivers in that heart
Which drives me to this end;
I draw and kiss the bloody dart,
My last—my only friend!

Historians are divided about whether the poem can plausibly be identified as the work of Lincoln. In support of their theory, believers point out the fact the well-settled fact that Lincoln suffered from episodic bouts of melancholia throughout his life. Moreover, the existence of a Lincoln “suicide poem” has been rumored to exist since shortly after his assassination, when his close friend Joshua Speed told Lincoln’s law partner and later biographer William Herndon, about it in 1865. Speed also confided to Herndon that Lincoln had seriously spoken of suicide on at least two occasions, first at the age of twenty-six and again at thirty-one. Surprisingly, there are few naysayers who have come forward to contest the validity of the poem. Even Harold Holzer, the co-chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, declared, “It looks like Lincoln. It sounds like Lincoln. It probably is Lincoln.”

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