Two of the poem’s verses reveal eleven-year-old Willie’s awareness of the meaning of the Civil War:
There was no patriot like Baker,
So noble and so true;
He fell as a soldier on the field,
His face to the sky of blue. . . .
No squeamish notions filled his breast,
The Union was his theme;
‘No surrender and no compromise,’
His day-thought and night’s dream.74
The poem must have deeply affected Lincoln, who had had a long kinship with Baker. In Illinois, the two had served together in the Black Hawk War, in the state legislature, and on the law circuit. They had engaged in the musical-chairs political arrangement whereby Lincoln succeeded Baker in the US Congress. They enjoyed competing at fives, a form of handball. The two became so close that Lincoln named his second son Edward Baker Lincoln. Baker subsequently moved to California, where he practiced law and promoted the Free Soil cause, and then to Oregon, where he was elected as a Republican US senator. While serving in the Senate in 1860–61, he spoke out eloquently against secession and on behalf of Lincoln and the Union. He was chosen to introduce Lincoln at the president’s first inauguration.
Lincoln was devastated when he heard of Baker’s death at Ball’s Bluff. He got the news in the telegraph office and left “with bowed head, and tears rolling down his furrowed cheeks, his face pale and wan, his heart heaving with emotion.” He “almost fell as he stepped into the street” and walked with his hands across his chest, stumbling into the White House without returning the salute of a sentinel at the door.75 Lincoln said that Baker’s death “smote him like a whirlwind from a desert.”76
When Lincoln read Willie’s affecting verses about Baker, he could not know that an even more terrible whirlwind was about to strike. Within two weeks of writing the poem, Willie himself was gone.
It appears that the boy died of typhoid fever, perhaps caused by water pumped into the White House from the Potomac River, which was contaminated by fecal matter from soldiers’ camps that lacked latrine trenches. Also near the White House was a fetid marsh where human waste and animal carcasses were deposited.
In January 1862, Willie became feverish and was confined to an upstairs room. The Lincolns had planned a ball for February 5, and they sent out hundreds of invitations. But they grew apprehensive over Willie’s condition, and by the end of the month Mary wanted to cancel the event. However, Dr. Robert Stone reported that Willie’s condition had improved. The party was on, with the president’s caveat that there would be no dancing.
The evening was spectacular. Some five hundred guests came: politicians, military figures, diplomats, and social figures. Lincoln’s cabinet members arrived, as did congressmen and generals, including George McClellan and John Frémont, along with Frémont’s wife, Jessie. Salmon Chase attended with his daughter Kate, whose blue satin dress competed for fashion-worshippers’ attention with Mary’s flowered Parisian headdress, pearl necklace, and low-cut white gown with black flounces and ribbons. Also attending was “the inevitable Nat” Willis, who, as a journalist commented, “was in full force, saying witty things and graceful things in equal proportion.”77 Heaped platters offered duck, turkey, beef, quail, foie gras, oysters, and cakes of different designs, including a Swiss cottage and Fort Pickens. Desserts of spun sugar represented a war helmet, a temple surmounted by the Goddess of Liberty, beehives, and the frigate Union supported by cherubs that were decorated by the Stars and Stripes. It was not a temperance evening. Champagne and wine flowed, and other liquor was available, including a rum-and-champagne punch in an enormous Japanese bowl. The Marine Band played songs, starting with “The President’s March” and ending with “The Mary Lincoln Polka,” composed for the occasion. Upstairs in Willie’s sickroom, the distant music came “in soft, subdued murmurs, like the wild, faint sobbing of far-off spirits,” according to Lizzy Keckly, who watched anxiously over the boy.
Mary’s mind was on her son. She left the party several times to go upstairs and check on him.
Over the next two weeks, the gala became a glittering memory. Willie grew delirious and weak, then fell into a coma. He died on February 20, 1862, at 5:00 p.m.
Standing over Willie’s body, Lincoln heaved with tears. He said, “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die!”79 He walked down the hall, stopped at his secretary’s office, and said, “Well, Nicolay, my boy is gone—he is actually gone!”80 He burst into tears, entered his own office, and shut the door.
Mary went into convulsions of grief. She stayed in bed for days, until her sister Elizabeth Edwards arrived from Illinois and persuaded her to go to church. Lincoln, seeing that Mary was in no condition to tend to Tad, who had also fallen ill, had a hospital nurse, Rebecca Pomroy, stay at the White House until the boy recovered.
Lincoln had sobbing sessions alone in his bedroom. Unlike Mary, who was incapacitated by grief, he attended Willie’s funeral and burial, which were arranged by the president’s Illinois friend Orville Browning. The funeral followed the era’s conventions of the Good Death. Willie was embalmed, and his body lay in the Green Room for viewing. Lying in a faux-rosewood metallic coffin, Willie wore his usual brown pants and jacket, with white socks and low shoes, and his white shirtsleeves turned over his jacket cuffs. Wreaths lay on his chest and at his feet. His hands were folded over a bouquet on his chest, and flowers surrounded his body.81
The funeral service was held in the crepe-draped East Room. Dignitaries, many of whom had been at the ball earlier in the month, somberly assembled in the room and heard the sermon of the Reverend Phineas Gurley of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. Pallbearers carried Willie’s coffin to the hearse, which led a long, slow procession to Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown for interment. Oak Hill was one of the nineteenth century’s rural cemeteries, like Mount Auburn in Massachusetts or Green-Wood in Brooklyn. Dr. Gurley conducted another service in the cemetery chapel, and Willie’s coffin was placed in a crypt, available for later removal and reburial in Illinois.
For three months, Mary alternated between paroxysmal sobbing and passive depression. She wore black for a year. She could not bear to enter the upstairs guest room, where Willie had died, or the Green Room, where he’d been embalmed. She was so distraught that reportedly Lincoln at one point looked out a window to the distant St. Elizabeths, a mental hospital, and warned Mary that she might have to be sent there unless she brought herself under control.
To newspaper readers, however, she seemed to be observing the decorum of the Good Death, which called for grief restrained by faith and resignation. A month after Willie’s death, the White House’s publicist in chief John Hay, as the Idler, reported:
All of our readers will be pleased to learn, we doubt not, . . . that Mrs. Lincoln is slowly recovering from the effects of her sad bereavement and her unceasing motherly care. Her sister, Mrs. Edwards, is now with her, and has had the melancholy satisfaction of gazing on the lifeless yet lifelike remains of little Willie, which are temporarily deposited in the picturesque Oak Hill Cemetery, at Georgetown.82
Mary had lost her beloved Willie. But she had not given up on seeing him again. American culture offered her a ready means of doing so.
THE LINCOLNS IN THE BARDO
Spiritualism—direct communication with the dead—had roots in biblical times, and more recently in the mysticism of the eighteenth-century philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. Spiritualism gained real popularity in America in 1848, after two sisters in the village of Hydesville, New York, Margaret and Catherine Fox, heard rapping sounds in their home allegedly produced by a ghost they called Splitfoot. Maggie and Kate Fox soon became celebrities, sought after for their powers as spiritualist mediums, with a special capacity for receiving messages from the afterlife.
Within two years the spiritualist movement had gained traction, and by 1867 the movement claimed eleven million adherents in America.83 Among the notables who took up with spiritualism were William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, Fanny Fern, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Parker Pillsbury, Benjamin Wade, and Joshua Giddings. Others who attended séances included James Fenimore Cooper, Horace Greeley, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman. A number of people in Mary Lincoln’s circle turned to spiritualism, including Lizzy Keckly, Chev Wikoff, and Gideon Welles’s wife, Mary Jane, one of Mary’s closest friends.
Books promoting the new craze appeared, including Judge John W. Edmonds’s two-volume tome Spiritualism and Robert Dale Owen’s Footfalls of the Boundary of Another World. Consoling novels about the afterlife included Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s bestselling trilogy The Gates Ajar, Beyond the Gates, and The Gates Between and George S. Woods’s The Gates Wide Open; or, Scenes in Another World.
Apparent miracles became commonplace among spiritualists. Groups typically sat around a table at which a medium, often a young woman, served as a vehicle for communication with the dead, who sent messages through raps, musical sounds, ghostly hands, and the lifting of tables, chairs, pianos, and so on. Sometimes a person in the room would float upward while seated in a chair, ostensibly supported by invisible arms. Spiritualist mediums took on extraordinary powers. For instance, Judge Edmonds’s daughter, thirteen-year-old Laura, reportedly played sophisticated Beethoven pieces while in a trance, even though she had never previously touched a piano.84 Edmonds also told of mediums who knew only English but spoke Greek, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, German, and other languages fluently while under spiritual influences. Spirits directed the writing of books—they were literally ghostwriters. Starting in 1861, spirit photographs were taken, in which the ghosts of the departed appeared in the company of the living.
It was not unusual, then, for Mary Lincoln to consult spiritualists after the death of Willie. She held séances in the White House. She also went to a number of séances at the home of Cranston Laurie in Georgetown. Laurie had a daughter, Belle Miller, who was reputedly a gifted medium. Not only could she talk with the departed, but, while entranced, she also played wonderful piano pieces while the piano itself pitched and rocked in rhythm to the music. Lincoln, who sometimes accompanied Mary to séances, allegedly sat on the waltzing piano and conceded that its movement might result from “invisible power.”85
At the Lauries’ home, Mary met another young medium, Nettie Colburn, who gave communications from what she called a Congress of Spirits, which included Pinkie (an Aztec princess who had died five hundred years before), Bright Eyes (a diminutive squaw), Priscilla (John Alden’s wife), and Dr. Bamford (a physician from Colburn’s Connecticut childhood). Dr. Bamford, with his Yankee twang, became Lincoln’s favorite spirit. Not only did Lincoln witness Colburn in spiritual trances, but he received from his good friend Joshua Speed, a believer in spiritualism, a recommendation of Nettie and another young woman as “mediums & believers in the spirits” who were “very choice spirits themselves.”86
Spiritualists tended to be radically antislavery, and it was not unusual that Nettie Colburn approached Lincoln at a séance and told him that the Congress of Spirits said “the world is in universal bondage; it must physically set free.” She reportedly lectured Lincoln for an hour on “the importance of emancipating the slave, saying that the war could not end until slavery was abolished: That all men should be free to rise to their destined status.”87 The spirits had told her that Lincoln should stand firm and not waver in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, which would be “the crowning event of his administration and his life.
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