In the Houses of Their Dead by Terry Alford

In the Houses of Their Dead by Terry Alford

Author:Terry Alford
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2022-05-09T00:00:00+00:00


Charles Foster. A preeminent medium of the Civil War era, Foster held séances for both Mary Lincoln and the Booths. He and an otherworldly friend are photographed here by William Mumler, a “spirit photographer.” Foster was later committed to the State Lunatic Hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts.

One night Mary came to Emilie’s bedroom. Her eyes were full of tears, yet she was smiling. “I want to tell you,” the First Lady said excitedly, “that one may not be wholly without comfort when our loved ones leave us. Willie comes to me every night and stands at the foot of my bed with the same sweet adorable smile he has always had. You cannot dream of the comfort this gives me.”

Her voice trembled in excitement as she spoke. “Her eyes were wide and shining,” Emilie wrote in her diary, “and I had a feeling of awe as if I were in the presence of the supernatural. It is unnatural and abnormal. It frightens me.”

Bartlett wrote, “I think that an over-belief causes more discord and unhappiness in a family than an under-belief.”35

It was fortunate for Mary and her husband that the public’s awareness of visitors like Foster was limited. Those who knew of the séances viewed them as a harmless diversion of the president or just another quirk of his quirky First Lady. Negative publicity was entirely partisan. It presented the sittings as attempts by a failed administration to find any path to military victory. The New York World, a leading voice of Lincoln’s Democratic critics, noticed them with a jab at Belle Miller. “The President is reported to have consulted again the Georgetown witch,” wrote editor and publisher Manton Marble in 1864. “It is not generally believed he is an open convert to spiritualism, but he consents to be instructed by mediums as a military necessity.”36

According to Ohio attorney David Quinn, a particularly bitter critic of the president, Lincoln had a secret space in the White House in which he hid a rapping table. No need for a constitution when it tapped, thumped, and banged out orders from Hannibal and Attila the Hun that were the new law of the land. The table directed the president’s every move, claimed Quinn. “It gathers armies, presages events, equalizes whites and negroes, and converts paper into gold. The nation is virtually on fire, its property melting in the general conflagration, and the blood of its children flowing from its mountains to its oceans, while its executive councils gather in dark rooms and direct armies and a great nation’s policy, as they themselves are directed by spirit rappings.”37

Three decades later, in reaction to the publication of Nettie Colburn’s autobiography, Lincoln’s secretary John G. Nicolay told an interviewer that the allegation that the president was a spiritualist was too absurd to need comment. He then proceeded to do just that. “I have no doubt that Mr. Lincoln, like a great many other men, might have had some curiosity as to spiritualism, and he might have attended some of these séances solely out of curiosity.



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