Abraham Lincoln never carried a pocket knife.

Not because he didn't need one. Every man on the Illinois frontier carried a blade. But Lincoln told a fellow legislator that while he appeared "very much full of fun" and "vigorous" in public, when alone he was "so full of mental depression that I won't even carry a knife in my pocket." His law partner William Herndon confirmed it: "He never carried a pocket knife" — for as long as Herndon knew him.

The man America trusted to hold a nation together was a man his friends didn't trust with a blade.

That contradiction — the accessible president who remained unknowable, the Peacemaker who absorbed everyone else's conflict while quietly falling apart — is the engine of Lincoln's entire life. And it's the key to understanding him as an Enneagram Type 9.

Herndon, who spent sixteen years at a shared desk with Lincoln, put it plainly: he was "the most reticent — Secretive man... trusting no man, nor woman, nor child with the inner secrets of his ambitious soul." His secretary John Hay saw a different man: "The old man sits here and wields like a backwoods Jupiter the bolts of war and the machinery of government with a hand especially steady & equally firm."

Both descriptions are true. That's the paradox the Enneagram resolves.

TL;DR: Why Abraham Lincoln is an Enneagram Type 9
  • The Knife He Wouldn't Carry: Lincoln's depression was so severe he never trusted himself with a pocket knife. The Peacemaker who held the Union together managed his own fragility by removing the means of harm — and never told anyone unless directly asked.
  • The Hot Letters: When Lincoln was furious — and he was furious often — he wrote scorching letters, then filed them with the notation "Never sent. Never signed." He processed anger privately so it never damaged relationships. The most devastating letter he ever wrote, to General Meade after Gettysburg, Meade never read.
  • The Grief He Scheduled: After his 11-year-old son Willie died in the White House during the war, Lincoln returned to the Green Room every Thursday, locked the door, and grieved alone for an hour. Then he walked to his office and ran a war. He compartmentalized sorrow so it wouldn't break the people depending on him.
  • The Rivals He Embraced: He appointed his four biggest political enemies to his cabinet. When Salmon Chase actively tried to steal the 1864 nomination, Lincoln's response was to appoint him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. When Edwin Stanton called him "a damned long-armed ape," Lincoln made him Secretary of War.

The Type 9 Who Held the Union Together

Lincoln was no passive Peacemaker. He represents the fully integrated Type 9 — what the Enneagram calls "The Idealist" (9w1), combining the peace-seeking core with a One wing's moral conviction. He waited for the right moment to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and when he signed it, he declared: "My whole soul is in it."

The tell isn't his gentleness. It's how he handled conflict.

Type 3s fight to win. Type 8s fight to dominate. Lincoln absorbed. He took Stanton's insults and gave him a promotion. He took Chase's betrayal and gave him the highest court. He wrote furious letters and never sent them. He read Shakespeare alone at night while the nation bled. He merged with the country's pain until his own face, visitors noted, aged decades in four years.

His guiding philosophy: "My policy is to have no policy." Pragmatic, flexible, willing to experiment when one approach failed. He held steady on values while remaining open on methods — holding all perspectives in the room because a Peacemaker can't bear to let any voice go unheard.

The Frontier That Forged the Peacemaker

Born February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky, Lincoln learned early that survival meant adaptation, not confrontation. His mother Nancy died when he was nine. His infant brother Thomas died before him. His sister Sarah died in childbirth when he was eighteen.

Death surrounded him, and the boy learned to contain grief rather than express it.

His father Thomas disapproved of his son's intellectual pursuits, snatching books from Abraham's hands and pulling him out of school to work the fields. One historian notes that "one of the origins of Lincoln's hatred of slavery is the way his father treated him" — forced to labor for neighbors, with Thomas pocketing every cent.

Rather than rebel, Lincoln adapted. He read by firelight after exhausting days of physical labor. He borrowed every book he could find. And he wrestled — losing just one match out of roughly 300 bouts, according to tradition, earning induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1992. Wrestling isn't about destroying opponents. It's about control, leverage, and knowing when to act. Lincoln brought that same energy to politics: patient positioning followed by decisive moves.

This pattern — accommodating external demands while quietly developing an inner world — is textbook Type 9. His total formal education amounted to less than one year.

The estrangement ran deep. Lincoln never invited his father and stepmother to Springfield, though they lived a hundred miles away. They never met his wife or children. When Thomas lay on his deathbed, Lincoln refused to visit, concluding that "a meeting would likely be more painful than pleasant." A man who would reconcile a nation at war couldn't face his own father — because for a Nine, the conflict that cuts deepest is the one closest to home.

The Man Nobody Knew

Shakespeare in the Dark

Lincoln kept a copy of Macbeth in his pocket as a young lawyer riding circuit from town to town. He read Shakespeare obsessively but never quoted him publicly — only in private, among close friends.

At the Soldiers' Home summer cottage, he would read Shakespeare for hours with a single secretary for audience. John Hay wrote in his diary on August 23, 1863: "He read Shakespeare to me, the end of Henry VI and the beginning of Richard III till my heavy eyelids caught his considerate notice & he sent me to bed."

His favorite passages reveal his psychology. He was drawn to Richard II's "terrible outburst of grief and despair" in the Third Act. And he was haunted by Macbeth above all. He wrote to actor James Hackett: "I think nothing equals Macbeth — It is wonderful."

One night, Senate Secretary John Weiss Forney discovered Lincoln sitting alone, his face "ghastly pale, the dark rings were round his caverned eyes." A book lay open on his lap. Lincoln asked if he might recite a passage that "comes to me tonight like a consolation," then began: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day..."

Days before his assassination, sailing up the Potomac from captured Richmond, Lincoln read aloud from Macbeth for hours. He lingered on the lines after Duncan's murder and commented on "how exact a picture Shakespeare here gives of a murderer's mind when, the dark deed achieved, its perpetrator already envies his victim's calm sleep."

The Commander-in-Chief processing the weight of 600,000 dead through a play about the cost of power.

The Telegraph Office

Lincoln spent more time at the War Department's telegraph office than anywhere else outside the White House. He visited nearly every night, sometimes sleeping on a cot during pivotal battles. Telegraph operator David Homer Bates recalled that the office provided "a refuge from all of the responsibilities that weighed upon him." Lincoln would sometimes drop in and joke that he was trying "to get rid of the pestering crowd of office-seekers."

He sat at a desk near a window overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, reading incoming telegrams he called "lightning messages" while telegraph keys chattered around him. A Type 9 finding peace in the mechanical rhythms of a room full of machines — not silence, exactly, but a kind of impersonal noise that asked nothing of him.

The Hot Letters

Lincoln's relationship with anger is the most revealing Type 9 evidence in the historical record.

He was furious more often than the mythology admits. But his anger never detonated in public. Instead, he wrote what he called "hot letters" — scorching correspondence where he poured his fury onto the page, then set the letter aside until his emotions cooled. Afterward, he would write on the envelope: "Never sent. Never signed." Multiple such letters were found in his desk after his assassination.

The most famous: the letter to General George Meade, July 14, 1863. Eleven days after Gettysburg, Lee's battered army sat trapped against a flooded Potomac. Meade failed to attack. Lee escaped back into Virginia. Lincoln was devastated.

He wrote: "I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee's escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely."

The closing was devastating: "Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it."

Lincoln never sent it. Sharpening a general's guilt wouldn't win a war. Meade never knew Lincoln blamed him.

This is the Nine's anger management distilled: feel it fully, articulate it precisely, then choose the relationship over the release. When told that Stanton had called him names, Lincoln replied: "Now, now, Stanton is entitled to his opinion." Then, with a twinkle: "What concerns me is that I have found that when Stanton says something, he is usually right."

Herndon saw the mechanism clearly: "Mr. Lincoln was a very sensitive man, and hence, in dealing with others, he avoided wounding their hearts or puncturing their sensibility. He was unusually considerate of the feelings of other men, regardless of their rank, condition or station."

The Team of Rivals

Lincoln's cabinet is the Enneagram Type 9 in action at national scale.

He appointed his four biggest political enemies to key posts: William Seward as Secretary of State, Salmon Chase as Secretary of the Treasury, Edward Bates as Attorney General, and Edwin Stanton as Secretary of War. All had run against him for the 1860 Republican nomination. They were barely on speaking terms with each other.

Seward's arc: Seward initially saw himself as the real power. On April 1, 1861, he submitted a memo essentially suggesting Lincoln let him run the government. Lincoln gently declined. Over time, Seward was won over. He wrote home: "His magnanimity is almost superhuman... The President is the best of us."

Chase's betrayal: Chase actively tried to undermine Lincoln, blamed Seward for undue influence, and maneuvered to steal the 1864 Republican nomination through the "Pomeroy Circular" — a confidential document attacking Lincoln. He repeatedly threatened resignation as a manipulation tactic. Lincoln's response: "Let him alone; he can do no more harm in here than he can outside." When Lincoln finally accepted Chase's fourth resignation offer in June 1864, it was only because he'd already secured the nomination. Then, when Chief Justice Taney died that October, Lincoln appointed Chase to the Supreme Court. He rewarded the man who betrayed him with the highest judicial position in the land.

Stanton's transformation: Stanton had called Lincoln "that damned long-armed ape" and publicly humiliated him during the McCormick Reaper case in 1857. Lincoln appointed him Secretary of War anyway because Stanton was the most competent man for the job. Stanton became one of Lincoln's most devoted subordinates. At Lincoln's deathbed on April 15, 1865, Stanton wept and said: "Now he belongs to the ages."

The strategy was pure Nine: hold all perspectives together, absorb the conflict personally, keep everyone in the room. As Doris Kearns Goodwin observed, Lincoln's cabinet "represented very different spectrums of political opinion from very conservative to moderate, to radical. And as long as he could keep that coalition together by keeping these people inside the tent, he was actually keeping those strands in the country together as well."

The Melancholy

Herndon described it starkly: "His melancholy dripped from him as he walked."

Lincoln experienced what modern psychiatrists would likely diagnose as major depressive disorder. His family had a history of melancholy. His suicidal ideation was severe enough that friends twice stood watch.

The 1835 breakdown: After Ann Rutledge's death on August 25, Lincoln spent weeks "talking about suicide, wandering alone in the woods with his gun." A neighbor remembered Lincoln saying "he couldn't bear the idea of rain falling on Ann's grave." Bowling Green, a justice of the peace who became a kind of second father, took Lincoln into his home for weeks until the worst passed.

The 1841 breakdown: During a political crisis and a broken engagement to Mary Todd, Lincoln collapsed. Joshua Speed, his closest friend and roommate of four years, recalled: "Lincoln went crazy. I had to remove razors from his room — take away all knives and other such dangerous things." Lincoln wrote to Congressman John Todd Stuart: "I am now the most miserable man living. If what I felt were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth."

From an Enneagram perspective, Lincoln's depression reflects a core Type 9 pattern: when peace-seeking fails and conflict cannot be avoided, Nines turn their frustration inward. They suppress anger, merge with circumstances, and experience what feels like dissolution of self.

The Green Room

After his 11-year-old son Willie died of typhoid fever on February 20, 1862 — in the White House, during the war — Lincoln returned to the Green Room every Thursday, locked the door, and grieved alone. After about an hour, he walked to the president's office and began the day's work.

Mary took to her bed for three weeks and couldn't attend the funeral. Lincoln absorbed the grief privately, in a scheduled compartment, then went back to running a war.

A man who scheduled his grief into one-hour weekly appointments so it wouldn't interfere with holding the nation together. He didn't refuse to feel. He just couldn't afford to feel in public.

Humor as Survival

Lincoln used jokes to defuse critics, explain complex positions, and step away from burdens that would otherwise crush him. When Congressman James Ashley disapproved of a story Lincoln had just told, the President replied: "Ashley, if I couldn't tell these stories, I would die."

This wasn't exaggeration. Hay wrote in his diary, marveling at Lincoln's ability to shift registers: "Occupied all day with matters of vast moment, deeply anxious about the fate of the greatest army of the world, with his own fame & future hanging on the events of the passing hour, he yet has such a wealth of simple bonhomie & good fellowship."

Secretary Welles was shocked that Lincoln could laugh heartily at a jest moments before turning to consider the Emancipation Proclamation. But shifting from mirth to seriousness wasn't inconsistency. It was the Nine's survival strategy -- laughter as pressure valve, so the grief underneath wouldn't crack the vessel.

The Private Lincoln

During a formal White House dinner, Lincoln picked up a gold fork and used it to feed his cat Tabby from the table. When Mary said this was "shameful in front of their guests," Lincoln replied: "If the gold fork was good enough for former President James Buchanan, I think it is good enough for Tabby." Treasury official Maunsell B. Field wrote: "I have seen him fondle one [a cat] for an hour."

His sons kept goats named Nanny and Nanko on the White House lawn. Nanny slept in Tad's bed. In the evenings at the Soldiers' Home cottage, Lincoln sat on the veranda rocking, played checkers with Tad by moonlight, or read Shakespeare aloud for hours.

Lincoln's iconic beard came from an 11-year-old girl named Grace Bedell who wrote him a letter in 1860 suggesting facial hair would make him look more distinguished. He took her advice -- a small example of his openness to outside perspectives, and a Nine's willingness to let others shape him.

He walked the streets of Washington alone at night, regularly, despite the war. Friends cautioned him. He never listened. One rainy night around 1:00 a.m., leaving the War Department, Lincoln told his guards: "Don't come out in the storm with me tonight, boys. I have my umbrella, and can get home safely without you." The guards replied they had "positive orders from Secretary Stanton" not to let him walk alone.

In August 1864, riding alone at night to the Soldiers' Home, a rifle shot rang out. His horse bolted and Lincoln's hat flew off. Soldiers found it the next day with a bullet hole through the crown. Lincoln asked his friend Ward Hill Lamon to keep the incident quiet.

The Better Angels

Lincoln's words were his greatest weapon. But his most famous passage wasn't entirely his own.

William Seward, his former rival turned closest ally, responded to a draft of the First Inaugural with a seven-page letter containing 49 suggestions, including a warning that if Lincoln delivered it unaltered, Virginia and Maryland would secede within sixty days. Seward suggested a new closing that ended with "the guardian angel of the nation."

Lincoln scratched out Seward's phrase and replaced it. Seward placed salvation outside humanity — an angel guarding from above. Lincoln relocated it within: "the better angels of our nature." Something already present inside both northerners and southerners.

The full passage: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone 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."

A Peacemaker pleading with a nation to remember what holds it together. And insisting that the capacity for reconciliation isn't divine intervention — it's already in us.

Frederick Douglass and the Complicated Legacy

Lincoln's reputation isn't simple. He initially opposed only the extension of slavery, not slavery itself. He supported colonization well into his presidency. In 1862, he lectured a delegation of Black Washingtonians on why they should endorse this policy. He approved the execution of 38 Dakota men -- the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

But Lincoln changed. And his three meetings with Frederick Douglass trace the arc.

August 10, 1863: Douglass came to the White House unannounced to protest discrimination against Black soldiers — unequal pay, denial of promotions. Lincoln listened. Douglass wrote afterward: "He was the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color."

August 19, 1864: Fearing he'd lose the election and a Democratic president would reverse emancipation, Lincoln asked Douglass to devise a plan to help enslaved people flee behind Union lines. Douglass observed: "What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had even seen before in anything spoken or written by him."

March 4, 1865: At the Second Inaugural reception, policemen seized Douglass at the door — their directions were to "admit no persons of his color." They tried to route him through a temporary exit. Douglass refused to leave. When Lincoln saw him enter the East Room, his "countenance lighted up" and he called out: "Here comes my friend Douglass." Then: "There is no man's opinion that I value more than yours; what do you think of it?" Douglass replied: "Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort."

Eleven years later, Douglass delivered a more complex assessment. He called Lincoln "preeminently the white man's President" but also "a progressive man, a human man, an honorable man, and at heart an antislavery man." Lincoln evolved through relationship, through listening, through the Nine's willingness to integrate new perspectives rather than defend old positions.

The Family

Mary was talkative, sociable, and craved attention. Lincoln was "slow, moody and enjoyed a silent room." Judge David Davis observed that on Saturday evenings when other lawyers went home to their families, "Lincoln would find some excuse and refuse to go. We said nothing, but it seemed to us all he was not domestically happy."

Four sons. Only Robert survived to adulthood. Eddie died at three. Willie died at eleven. Tad would die at eighteen. Mary would be committed to an asylum at her own son Robert's instigation.

Robert later wrote that he "scarcely even had ten minutes quiet talk with [his father] during his Presidency, on account of his constant devotion to business." Even Lincoln's love was mediated through sacrifice -- a Type 9 pattern of merging with external demands at the cost of intimate connection.

On the afternoon of April 14, 1865 — hours before he went to Ford's Theatre — Lincoln signed a pardon for a soldier sentenced to death for desertion. He remarked: "Well, I think the boy can do us more good above ground than under ground."

It was his last official act of mercy. The man who couldn't carry a knife had spent four years finding reasons not to use the executioner's.

Disclaimer This analysis of Abraham Lincoln's Enneagram type is speculative, based on publicly available information, and may not reflect the actual personality type of Abraham Lincoln.