The Apparitionists by Peter Manseau

Author:Peter Manseau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I shall not know him . . .

“Did you ever dream of some lost friend,” Lincoln had asked his aide, “and feel that you were having a sweet communion with him, and yet have a consciousness that it was not a reality? That is the way I dream of my lost boy Willie.”

For Mary Todd Lincoln, the hope of such communion was not just a dream. Long curious about Spiritualism, her interest intensified after Willie’s death, sparking rumors of séances convened in the White House.

While the Confederate newspapers danced on the boy’s grave, the northern Spiritualist press reported on the progress of his soul into the afterlife, noting the medium Fannie Conant’s claims that she had successfully channeled his ghost. As she had with so many of those who had died during the war, she fell into a trance in the Banner of Light’s offices and spoke in a voice that answered to his name. In the first lady’s estimation, this was not at all far-fetched. “Willie lives,” Mrs. Lincoln was known to say. “He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of the bed with the same sweet adorable smile he always has had.”

She even made a clandestine pilgrimage to see the spirit photographer who was receiving so much attention. At the time she first visited Mumler, Mrs. Lincoln had also recently learned that her brother, an officer in the Confederate army, had been killed in action. She arrived at the Boston studio in disguise and left only half satisfied, carrying an image of herself seated in the foreground and an apparition said to be her fallen brother standing nearby. She no doubt hoped it would be her innocent boy rather than her traitorous sibling who appeared on the glass, but the spirit world, she knew, could no more be controlled than the world of the living. Though he might have profited from such an image, it was later said that Mumler chose not to do so, “out of regard for President Lincoln, who was at that time on the eve of a reelection to his office.”

That his wife held such innocent belief in the possibility of bridging the chasm that had opened between parents and child became a further weight on the thoroughly pragmatic president. “Mr. Lincoln was greatly annoyed by reports that he was interested in Spiritualism,” the family’s pastor, Dr. Phineas Gurley, later recalled.

It was not that Lincoln failed to understand the longing for connection Spiritualist beliefs offered, however. He understood it perfectly well. Something of that longing showed in his eyes as Gardner prepared one plate after another to record his image on glass.

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