Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography by Jean Harvey Baker

Author:Jean Harvey Baker [Baker, Jean Harvey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

BY July 1862 Mary Lincoln had sufficiently recovered to move to the Soldiers’ Home, the presidential retreat on a wooded hill three miles from the White House in the northern part of the city. Since Willie’s death she had paid no attention to the war, not wanting to merge her special loss in that of others. Her husband, however, had been optimistic about victory in May, when the Union forces had penetrated to within fourteen miles of the Confederate capital at Richmond. Then, before General Lee’s defenders, McClellan’s offensive stalled in the swamps near the Chickahominy River. When word of the bloody June battles at Beaver Dam Creek, Gaines’s Mill, Savage’s Station, and Malvern Hill filtered back to Washington, Lincoln spent his days and nights in the War Department, watching the telegraph operators decode the story of a failed campaign. In early July the President visited the Army of the Potomac in Virginia and shortly thereafter he replaced McClellan with Henry Halleck in his continuing search for a successful general.

In the meantime, his lonely wife went North. Dressed in her widow’s weeds, she visited New York, ostensibly to raise money for the army hospitals and to get Tad out of a city ridden with smallpox and malaria. In November she repeated her trip, this time spending more than a week in Boston. Robert was now a sophomore at Harvard and a heroic figure to nine-year-old Tad, who often sought his older brother’s company.

But New York and Boston had other attractions. During the 1850s both cities had become centers of the spiritualist movement. In darkened private parlors, on curtained public stages, through opaque crystal balls, and with misshapen wizzening rods, Americans were raising their dead during a war that killed disproportionate numbers of the young. According to the novelist William Dean Howells, every other house in Boston held a medium ready to console parents and wives, while Mary Lincoln’s friend Nathaniel Willis had somehow counted 300 circles and 40,000 spiritualists in a city of 177,000. Four spiritualist newspapers and the Society for the Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge had turned the Massachusetts capital into a meeting ground for those who believed that after the dead had shed their bodies like a snake’s skin, their spirits remained available to those who knew how to contact them. Meanwhile, in New York hundreds of mediums placed the living in touch with the identifiable spirits of the dead.22

Spiritualists dated their secular resurgence (the seeds of the movement had always existed in certain evangelical denominations) from the Rochester rappings in the tiny village of Hydesville, New York, where an old clapboard house belonging to Jack Fox had come alive with the sound of a spirit’s knocking. By the early 1850s Kate and Margaret Fox, the daughters of the household (guileless young women established the best rapport with the other world), were traveling about the country, bringing messages from the dead to grieving relatives. By 1854 there were more spiritualists than abolitionists and enough of the former to

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