Ghosts of Lincoln by Adam Selzer

Author:Adam Selzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: abraham lincoln, president lincoln, gettysburg
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2015-07-22T04:00:00+00:00

Lincoln and his cabinet and General Grant; most of these men were present at the final meeting. From left to right: Stanton, Welles, Chase, Lincoln, Grant, Seward, Speed, Bates, Dennison. This was basically a version of Carpenter’s First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation with Grant added in. Courtesy Library of Congress.

I Drift … I Drift …

When Charles Dickens returned to England after his 1867–1868 American tour, he brought with him a story that Sen. Charles Sumner had told him at dinner in Washington, and that he now took to telling at dinner parties himself. George Eliot was particularly impressed.

In Dickens’s version, on the morning of his assassination, Lincoln had gathered his cabinet together, plus a couple of major generals, and told them, gravely, that “something very extraordinary is going to happen, and … very soon.”

“Something good, I hope?” asked the attorney general.

“I don’t know—I don’t know. But it will happen, and very shortly, too.”

The President then went on (Dickens probably used a special voice to impersonate him) to say that he knew something was coming because of a dream he’d had. He had had it three times before, all before battles such as Bull Run which were major losses for the Union. When asked the nature of the dream, he said, “Well, I was on a great, broad, rolling river—and I am in a boat—and I drift … I drift … ”

Dickens was dramatizing things a bit, as was his wont. He used to particularly sell the pathos on the president saying “I drift … I drift … ”

The story as Dickens told it was wrong on many particulars—either Dickens was exaggerating things or heard it wrong from Sumner in the first place (I suspect the former), but the main point of the story—that Lincoln had told his cabinet he knew something big was happening on the morning of his assassination because of a recurring dream of a sailing ship—is indisputably true. And here, for once, we have a paranormal story of Lincoln on which the sources are absolutely unimpeachable.

And, rather than only circulating years later, the story was well known within days of the assassination.

On April 18, 1865, just three days and four nights after Lincoln was shot, the New York Herald printed an account of Lincoln’s last cabinet meeting. General Ulysses S. Grant, fresh from receiving Robert E. Lee’s surrender, had arrived in Washington, DC, and attended the meeting, and he and the cabinet discussed their hope that soon General Johnston, too, would be surrendering to General Sherman, effectively ending the war. Unlike the Dickens version of the story, Lincoln, according to the paper, said he had reason to believe that good (or at least important) news was coming:

“Well,” said the president, “you will hear very soon now, and the news will be important.”

“Why do you think so?” asked the general,

“Because,” said Mr. Lincoln, “I had a dream last night, and ever since the war began, I have invariably had the same dream before any very important military event has occurred.

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