Abraham Lincoln

The people who knew Abraham Lincoln described two men. One was the storyteller, quick with a joke and a homely anecdote, who could hold a room in a country store or a courtroom. The other was a man of deep, recurring sadness, whom his law partner William Herndon said seemed to drip melancholy as he walked. Both were real, and the combination shaped one of the most consequential presidencies in American history.

Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky. No one recorded the exact time; accounts say he was born around daybreak, and astrologers commonly use 6:54 a.m., just before sunrise, so the houses below are estimates rather than facts. On that chart his Moon is in Capricorn in the twelfth house, the hidden end of the wheel. Capricorn Moons are serious, self-contained and prone to carrying burdens alone, and the twelfth house governs private sorrow and what goes on out of public view. It is a strikingly apt picture of the melancholy his friends saw.

His Sun is in Aquarius, and on the dawn chart it sits in the first house with Aquarius rising. Aquarius is the sign of principle, equality and the collective good, and it describes someone whose sense of self is bound up with ideas larger than himself. Lincoln's political identity rested on one in particular: that the nation was founded on the proposition that all men are created equal, as he put it at Gettysburg.

He had less than a year of formal schooling in total. His mother died when he was nine, and he grew up on hard frontier farms in Kentucky and Indiana, reading whatever books he could borrow. He split rails, worked on a flatboat to New Orleans, kept a store, and taught himself law, becoming one of the best-known attorneys in Illinois. The 1858 Senate debates with Stephen Douglas made him a national figure, even though he lost that race, and two years later he was elected president.

Saturn, the planet of duty and hard responsibility, is in Sagittarius in the tenth house on that chart, the area tied to public role and reputation. Saturn in the tenth tends to describe authority that arrives with heavy burdens, and few presidents have carried heavier ones. Southern states began seceding before he took office, and he spent his presidency fighting the Civil War.

In 1863 he issued the Emancipation Proclamation and delivered the Gettysburg Address, about 270 words that redefined the purpose of the war. In January 1865 the House passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, an effort he had pushed hard. On April 14, 1865, days after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, he was shot at Ford's Theatre, and he died the next morning.

The storyteller and the melancholic never separated. Lincoln is often quoted as saying he laughed so that he would not weep, and the Capricorn Moon in the hidden house seems to have carried the rest.