Mary came under the spell of a spiritualist who proved to be especially controversial: Lord Colchester. Claiming to be the illegitimate son of an English duke, Colchester gave séances that featured musical sounds supposedly played by spirits. After hearing that Mary had been impressed by him, the journalist Noah Brooks attended one of his séances and exposed him by opening a curtain that revealed Colchester sitting with drums, a horn, and bells. Brooks got into a fistfight with Colchester and warned him to leave Washington and never return.89
Spiritualism provoked fierce criticism among those who saw it as un-Christian or dangerous. Newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Intelligencer berated the movement. But even such critics gave credence to it. After all, it was the age of miraculous new technology, notably the telegraph. If communications could travel thousands of miles within seconds, why could not the “spiritual telegraph” connect the living and the dead through what was thought to be invisible electromagnetic fluid?
Eventually, spiritualism came into disrepute. In the 1880s the Fox sisters turned against the movement, which they now dismissed as “an absolute falsehood from beginning to end, . . . the flimsiest of superstitions, . . . one of the greatest curses that the world has ever known.”90 Splitfoot, they revealed, referred to sounds they had made by cracking their toe joints under their dresses. Later, in the 1920s, when Arthur Conan Doyle and others championed spiritualism, Harry Houdini campaigned against it, proving that an illusionist could easily produce many of its manifestations.
But in Mary Lincoln’s lifetime, spiritualism was viable and growing. For believers, the spirits of the dead were always available for contact. A leading spiritualist wrote, “Our city streets are thronged with an unseen people who flit about us, jostling us in thick crowds, and in our silent chambers, our secret closets.”91 It was in the privacy of her bedroom that Mary had her most vivid spiritualistic experiences. When her half sister Emilie Todd visited the White House in 1863, Mary spoke to her of nightly visits from Willie. Her eyes wide and shining, Mary exclaimed:
He lives, Emilie! He comes to me every night, and stands at the foot of my bed with the same sweet, adorable smile he has always had; he does not always come alone; little Eddie is sometimes with him and twice he has come with our brother Alec, he tells me he loves his Uncle Alec and is with him most of the time. You cannot dream of the comfort this gives me.92
Mary said to Charles Sumner, “a very slight veil separates us, from the ‘loved & lost’ and to me, there is comfort, in the thought, that though unseen by us, they [the spirits of loved ones] are very near.”93 After her husband was killed, she entered a long period of mourning that was relieved somewhat when she went to William Mumler, a spiritual photographer who produced a photo of her with the ghostly Lincoln behind her. This was an era when, Arthur Conan Doyle claimed, “thousands of spirit photographs” were taken—doctored, obviously, but comforting to those like Mary who believed that spirits could be tangibly sensed and even photographed.94
Mary’s infatuation with spiritualism casts light on the long-debated issue of her mental health. A main reason that her staid son Robert had her committed to an asylum in 1875 was that she reported having the sensation that a tiny Native American woman was inside her head. Today, such a symptom might be attributed to psychosis, bipolar disorder, or severe trauma. But it should be noted that such delusions were common among spiritualists. Her seeing a squaw was no different from Nettie Colburn’s seeing Pinkie, Bright Eyes, and Dr. Bamford—or from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hearing a distant guitar and casually asking her husband which of their dead sons was strumming the instrument. In 1875, Mary Lincoln found herself in the position of the famous Elizabeth Ware Packard, the Illinois spiritualist whose husband, alarmed by her visions, had committed her in 1860 to the Jacksonville Insane Asylum, where she remained for three years. After her release, Packard publicly impugned her husband for committing her merely because of a difference in religious beliefs. She told her harrowing tale in books with titles like Marital Power Exemplified, or Three Years Imprisonment for Religious Belief by the Arbitrary Will of a Husband (1864) and The Prisoners’ Hidden Life, Or Insane Asylums Unveiled (1868).95
Actually, for most of the time in the seventeen years after her husband’s death, Mary Lincoln had her wits about her. She fought successfully for the reburial of her husband in an Illinois rural cemetery and then for a widow’s pension from Congress that she believed she deserved. She maintained a circle of friends and family. Her four months in the asylum were uneventful. She lived calmly there, and she then returned to normal life.96 As for her hallucinations, they came in the period after the untimely death in 1871 of her eighteen-year-old son Tad, with whom she had grown very close. Within a decade, Mary had suffered the loss of the three people very dear to her—Willie, Abe, and Tad. She had also experienced the deaths of Todd family members in the war, and she responded with deep emotion to the national bloodletting, which she compared to butchery. There was good reason why novels like The Gates Ajar and The Gates Wide Open became bestsellers after the war and why millions turned to spiritualism. Making direct contact with the spirits of loved ones was the nation’s way of alleviating the trauma of a war that took the lives of 750,000 Americans.
How did Abraham Lincoln feel about spiritualism?
He had closer connections to it than is generally realized. He told Mariah Vance, his black housekeeper in Springfield, that after the death of Eddie in 1851, he and Mary consulted “three good women who are in touch with the spirit world, and can straighten us out.”97 In 1860, when he went east before his presidential nomination, he reportedly had at least two sittings with a New York medium named J. B. Conklin, who saw him later in Cleveland on his trip from Springfield to Washington. Conklin recognized Lincoln as a client who had consulted him during his New York visit about a deceased person, “K.” This encounter with the medium was reported in a widely reprinted newspaper story, “The President Elect a Spiritualist.”98 After Edward Baker’s death at Ball’s Bluff, J. B. Conklin sent Lincoln a spirit letter allegedly written by Baker’s spirit, who assured Lincoln that death was “a happy reality—a glorious change” and that he, “like millions of other disembodied spirits,” was grateful that Lincoln was committed to sustaining “the Union.”99
In 1863, the linkages between President Lincoln and spiritualism strengthened. Newspapers reported Lincoln as having attended a séance led by a Charles E. Shockle in which the president received advice on war strategy from the spirits of Washington, Lafayette, Franklin, Napoleon, and others. (Lincoln joked that these great souls seemed just as confused about how to conduct the war as his cabinet was.) Soon a paper flatly stated, “We have an administration controlled by Spiritualism.” The report charged Lincoln with getting advice from noted spiritualists such as John Edmonds and Robert Dale Owen. Since spiritualism was considered one of the devilish offshoots of Puritanism, the writer affirmed that “no Puritan—no Spiritualist, has ever been arrested—none ever will” under Lincoln. “Has it come to this!” the writer exclaimed. “A great country governed by ghosts, spirits, hobgoblins, table-turnings, rappings, &c. Be not deceived; this is the nimbus of the administration.”100
These charges were made far more stridently in a pamphlet of 1863 by an Ohioan, David Quinn, titled Interior Causes of the War: The Nation Demonized, and Its President a Spirit-rapper. Under the command of spirits, Quinn wrote, the despotic Lincoln had launched a bloody war to liberate “the negro,” a “passive and dependent” creature whose “little dark eyes, flat nose, thick lips, bullet head, and animal expression . . . show, at a glance, his inferior nature.” Quinn drew a straight line from the fanatical Puritans of early New England to devilish modern spiritualists, whose leader was President Lincoln. The “spiritualist element,” Quinn wrote, infected the North, where “the puritanic blood most flowed”:
At one period, we find her burning witches, at another, hanging Quakers; and now, when she claims a higher development of civilization, we find her rallying all her forces to murder six millions of white people because she discovers them to be the owners of negro slaves. These things show a tendency to spiritual distempers or that fanaticism is natural to the Yankee mind.101
Although Lincoln was not a New Englander, Quinn argued, he typified the Puritan-Yankee spirit more than anyone. Quinn wrote: “Mr. Lincoln, we are well assured, is as confirmed a spiritualist as there is in the United States; has full faith in the communications.” He had “in a secret hole in the White House, a rapping table” by which he received regular instructions from Caesar, Washington, Jefferson, Napoleon, Jackson, and other past leaders. Lincoln was “a spiritualist of the abolitionist school . . . and has been, from the beginning of his term, directing the war under the direction of spirit rappings” with the aid of such mediums as “Robert Dale Owen, of Indiana, Judge Edmonds, of New York,” who “are said to be almost constantly around him, advising him from the spirit world, and urging him onward in his abolition, death-dealing policy.”
Some of Quinn’s claims were ludicrous. There’s no evidence of a “rapping table” in a “secret hole” of the White House. Nor would the rationalist Lincoln have allowed spirits to control him. He constantly received otherworldly advice but ignored it. He got “almost daily” letters, as William Stoddard reported, from “The Angel Gabriel,” who wrote him in blood (actually cheap red ink) with advice from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, among others.102 During the war years, he attended four or five séances with Mary; his attitude toward spiritualism wavered between amused interest and genial skepticism.103
Quinn was on surer ground when he said that Robert Dale Owen and Robert Edmonds, two leading spiritualists, advised Lincoln. Of the two, Edmonds was the pushiest on spiritual matters. Declaring that “we should have a Spiritualist as a President,” Edmonds wrote him in 1863 saying that he had “heard & read in various ways” that Lincoln was “so far interested in the subject, as to have entered upon its investigation.”104 Edmonds sent two of his own spiritualist books to the president, who replied tactfully, through a senator, “Please present my compliments to Judge Edmonds, & say to him the books will be gratefully accepted by me.”105
Despite his spiritualist beliefs, Edmonds apparently made no pretense of giving the president instructions directly from the spirit world. Lincoln knew well that Edmonds was a serious-minded man who had a history as a lawyer, legal scholar, and New York politician. In 1861, Edmonds made the sensible proposition to Lincoln that he appoint the New York antislavery editor and author William Cullen Bryant as secretary of state. Two years later, the abolitionist Sydney H. Gay made a strong argument that the president appoint Edmonds as the administration’s representative to investigate causes of the New York City draft riots. Lincoln considered the proposal seriously before deciding against sending a representative.
Robert Dale Owen was far closer to the heart of Lincoln’s vision than Edmonds. Short, thin, and blond haired, Owen was the son of the famous Scotch reformer Robert Owen, whose experimental socialist community New Harmony in the 1820s was near to Lincoln’s Indiana home during his adolescence. The elder Owen had been a holdover Enlightenment rationalist who turned to spiritualism in the years before his death in 1857. His son Robert Dale Owen was also a progressive who had been an Indiana state politician before serving in the US House of Representatives from 1843 to 1848. Following his father’s example, he was converted to spiritualism. His advocacy of the movement was neither naive nor ahistorical. In his books on spiritualism, he detailed the historical background of the movement over time in many religions. The miracles of modern spiritualists were to him demonstrable, not delusionary.
When it came to dealing with the harsh realities of the Civil War, Owen put aside his spiritualist speculations and fixed his attention on political and social facts. He met with Lincoln, advised him, and wrote letters to him and members of his cabinet. The advisory letters that Owen wrote to Lincoln were deliberate, reasoned, and persuasive. Before the war, Owen argued, the North had no constitutional rationale for interfering with Southern slavery. The war, however, abrogated the South’s constitutional rights. The most effective weapon that Lincoln had was a proclamation abolishing slavery. Such a proclamation, Owen affirmed, would strip the South, at least on paper, of its most valuable and treasured resource: enslaved people. In fact, Owen penned a draft of an emancipation proclamation that he hoped would serve as a template for the president. He sent the draft to Lincoln on September 17, 1862. Emphasizing that time was of the essence, he urged Lincoln to issue such a proclamation within a week. Five days later, on September 22, Lincoln released his own Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
Owen’s template was similar in sentiment to Lincoln’s proclamation, although Owen’s was more radical because it called for the abolition of slavery not only in the rebel states and not just for military reasons. It declared that “to hold and use Human Beings as property” was “always morally wrong” and that, “as essential to the salvation of the Republic[,] the condition of slavery is hereby forever abolished throughout the United States and every one of them.”106 Lincoln was as openly radical as Owen in one respect. Both declared enslaved people forever free. Neither of their proclamations promised the return of the South’s chattels once peace was restored.
Antislavery passion was the key quality that spiritualists had in common with Lincoln. Most spiritualists—from Garrison to Higginson to Owen—were, like him, strongly opposed to slavery. In the run-up to the 1864 presidential election, spiritualists put themselves at the forefront of pro-Lincoln campaigning. A nationwide spiritualist convention held in Chicago in August 1864 passed resolutions backing Lincoln’s antislavery war effort in the firmest terms. At a time when Peace Democrats called for a negotiated truce that would include maintaining slavery in the South, the spiritualists demanded that the war must continue, “no matter how long the struggle, how great the cost, or how fearful the sacrifice” in order to ensure the abolition of slavery.107 Southerners and Copperheads who attacked Lincoln, the spiritualists declared, merely advertised their cruelly callous attitude toward the “enslavement of millions of the human family and their posterity, herding them with the beasts that perish, and trafficking in their bodies and souls.” On the other side, radical abolitionists who called Lincoln too slow on emancipation failed to appreciate that the president “has never taken a step backward, but has steadily proceeded onward in the right direction, striking at the root of the rebellion, and seeking to secure the unity of our now dismembered Republic upon the basis of universal freedom and justice, without which there can be no peace.” Abraham Lincoln alone, the convention affirmed, was capable of leading a war to end slavery. His effectiveness as commander lay in his unique moral stature. In the words of one of the convention’s resolutions: “Abraham Lincoln stands before this nation, and before all Europe, as the political embodiment of the spirit and principle of freedom and free institutions, and as the political representative of the anti-slavery sentiment of the nation.” His reelection, then, was crucial.
Predictably, Lincoln’s opponents slammed the spiritualist convention, calling it another sign that Lincoln was the idol of those who fell for all the wild isms. One critic wrote: “It must be some solace to the Ancient Joker, that he can rely on the loyalty of the strong-minded women and weak-minded men who have been representing the ‘spheres’ in the convention of spiritualists held at Chicago during the last few days. It is well known that the infidels, atheists, free-thinks, free-lovers, spiritualists, and ‘progressive Christians’ have always been ardent admirers of Mr. Lincoln and his policy.”108 But the isms charge didn’t carry as much weight as it once had. The spiritualist convention, after all, was organized and orderly. Its pro-Lincoln resolutions were rationally presented statements, not mystical messages that arrived from above. The war, as directed by Lincoln, had brought under control some of the zanier aspects of spiritualism. Reformers, historically opposed to structured institutions, had found a new kind of institution, one they could believe in: a US government and a disciplined war effort led by a firm antislavery president.
Lincoln, in short, had the same kind of steadying influence on the isms as he did on his family, with the severe traumas it faced. He had a similarly stabilizing impact on many other disordered aspects of American politics and society.
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