Early Premonitions
During the summer of 1860, while Lincoln’s representatives promoted his candidacy for president, people all over the northern states witnessed the Great Meteor of 1860, a very rare “Earth grazing” procession of meteors that looked like a fireball blazing across the evening sky. The phenomenon was described by one witness as “The grandest meteor we ever had the fortune to see … (it) made its way through the heavens to the wonderment of every mortal with eyesight who was out of doors at the time … we were standing, at the moment, in the shadow of buildings that completely shut out the western sky. A flood of light, like that of a vivid, continuous flash of lightning, or like a bright dawn, streamed over the tops of the houses, and grew in intensity for a few seconds, ere the majestic orb sailed sublimely into sight overhead. Over the zenith it sped, reddish in hue, and with a wake of fire that spanned the sky for an instant like a vast arch of celestial flame.” 21
According to a 1931 history of Hamilton County, Tennesee,22 a crowd in Chattanooga, Tennessee, gathered in an open grove to see a speaker and instead saw the meteor pass by. It was said that the meteor appeared to split into two parts as it flew over the Tennessee sky, and some present declared that it was an omen that the country would soon be split into two parts as well.
Most accounts of the 1860 fireball say it was only really visible in the North, though I did find an August 1860 letter in a South Carolina newspaper describing seeing a brilliant, Roman candle-like meteor from Lookout Mountain, overlooking Chattanooga.23 No mention was made of it being an omen there, but plenty of papers did see the meteor as a harbinger of ill times ahead.
In the typical fiery rhetoric of its Lincoln-hating editor, Wilbur F. Storey, the Chicago Times saw it as a particularly grim sign: “Recorded history does not present a warning so wonderful and palpable!” Storey wrote. “Who can fail to perceive in the variegated lights of the meteor rising in the Northwest, the typification of the conglomerated isms headed by Lincoln? Who can fail to comprehend the lesson recorded by all the past history of omens, that these fiery messengers portend the approach of war, revolution, and change? Who fails to recognise the almost equal division of the meteor in mid-heaven, over the American Union, the disseverance of the Confederacy? If heaven has at all spoken to this self-doomed land, its warning has been written on the sky in the language that a child might understand.” 24
As a before-the-fact prediction, it’s really pretty impressive—it actually even uses the words “union” and “confederacy” in the same sentence, months before that was the official name of the Confederate States of America.
Less successful as soothsayers were the Boston Herald, who said “(The Meteor) came from the Northwest (like Lincoln and Douglas), but whether it is an omen for the success of Douglas or the defeat of Lincoln we cannot say … it went out as quick as ‘Old Abe’s’ star will next November.” 25
Of course, by July of 1860, predicting that the country would soon split into two was about like predicting that a football team that was ahead by forty-two points at the end of the third quarter was going to win the game. It required no particular psychic powers. By then, with Lincoln cruising toward the presidency (no matter what the Herald said) and southern states threatening to secede if he won, the split seemed almost inevitable.
Some assigned more specific omens to the meteor. A Sacramento paper speculated that this was a new visitation of the same comet that had been seen by Emperor Charles V three centuries before that had been deemed a sign of his impending death, just as the same comet had been a sign of the death of Pope Urban IV three centuries before that.26
The meteor, in any case, was only one of the stories of omens and dreams that were said (usually after some time had passed) to be celestial warnings of a dark future for both the nation and its new president, Abraham Lincoln.
Of course, not everyone spoke of omens quite so seriously. Take, for instance, Sen. Stephen Douglas himself, Lincoln’s debate rival in 1858 and rival candidate for president in 1860. Once, in a speech defending the Fugitive Slave Act, which required captured runaway slaves in non-slave states to be returned to their owners (a highly controversial law that forced northerners who’d previously been able to ignore slavery to confront it), Douglas actually used the superstitions of Africans as a reason why slavery was well within “God’s laws,” stating that “The history of the world furnishes few examples where any considerable portion of the human race have shown themselves significantly enlightened and civilized to exercise the rights and enjoy the blessings of freedom. In Asia and Africa we find nothing but ignorance, superstition, and despotism.” 27
One imagines, though, that Douglas didn’t have the same scorn for the Chicago Times and their superstitions about the Meteor of 1860. The paper basically existed to promote him in those days.
Senator Douglas has a complicated legacy as a politician, to say the very least. He brought the railroads to Chicago, essentially making the mud-hole village on the prairie into the city that would one day nominate Lincoln for president (an event that probably couldn’t have happened in any other city, as we shall see). And when he ran against Lincoln for president in 1860, he effectively dropped out of the campaign halfway through, realizing that Lincoln was going to win, and traveled through the South on a mission to keep the southern states from seceding from the Union, as they were by then threatening to do. It was a noble move, truly putting the needs of the country ahead of his own ambitions. Even Lincoln, his greatest rival, held him in high esteem privately—the two were sort of friendly enemies, debating publicly and ruthlessly in campaigns against one another, though they also traveled and dined together, and visited one another’s homes.
But Douglas’s views on race and slavery are a giant smear on his reputation. Nobody in the nineteenth century can honestly be expected to have views on race that hold up to today’s standards, but even by nineteenth-century standards, Douglas has a pretty bad record.
Though some tend to downplay the role slavery held in sparking the Civil War, it’s pretty much impossible to read vintage books, newspaper articles, and letters that touch on the rift between northern and southern states and think that the conflict had any other root at all. Look at the songs people sang, the letters they wrote, the articles they read, or the speeches they heard and you’ll get the distinct impression that everyone knew that the war was about slavery, even long before the abolition of the institution became a formal, or plausible, goal on the Union’s part. Reports about the Meteor of 1860 in southern papers tend to be buried among endless condemnations of Lincoln and the abolitionists, defenses of slavery, and instances of the northern states resisting the fugitive slave law, all held up as proof that secession would be a necessary step to preserving the institution. It was practically all some papers talked about that year.
Indeed, the conflict between slave states and free states had been raging ever since the states were still colonies—arguments about the institution had nearly derailed the drafting of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Lincoln maintained that the Founding Fathers sought to contain slavery on the assumption that it would die out on its own as long as they didn’t let it spread (though, then as now, claiming that the Founding Fathers agreed on anything was somewhat disingenuous). By the 1850s, it was often said that no debate about anything could go more than a few minutes without turning into a debate on slavery.
And it was Douglas, in fact, who truly lit the powder keg that blew the issue from a topic that inspired heated debate to a topic that inspired violence.
Since the early days of the nation, slave states had been eager to add more slave states to the Union, and non-slave states had been equally eager to add more free states; both sides wanted to have more votes than the other in Congress. As the country added more and more states and the debate grew tiresome, forces in Congress agreed to the Missouri Compromise in 1820, which determined that henceforth, states south of Missouri would be slave states, and states north of it would not be. This didn’t end the debate about slavery, but it quieted it down somewhat, since there wasn’t a new battle over it every time a new state was admitted. But it turned the debate firmly into a North-South issue, officially making the country, as Lincoln would later put it, “half slave and half free.”
It was Stephen Douglas who designed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and made it so that white male voters in new territories would determine for themselves whether slavery would be allowed within their borders. It would be fair to say that the act was controversial; when he spoke about the law in Chicago, he was pelted with raw produce. The Tribune later said that “in the melee that followed, nearly everybody got another man’s hat.” 28, 29
Stephen Douglas was known as the “Little Giant.” There are brochures about him set up on top of the sarcophagus in his tomb today. Courtesy Library of Congress.
When Kansas was admitted to the Union, pro-slavery militias known as “border ruffians” actually traveled there, determined to make Kansas a slave state by any means necessary. The “Bloody Kansas” battles that followed would later seem like warm-ups for the Civil War (one such border ruffian, Martin Quinlan, later ended up working as the city cemetery manager in Chicago and was arrested for taking bribes from grave robbers in 1857—he even helped them load the plundered corpses onto their wagons to take back to the medical schools).30
It was in this atmosphere, with slavery debates getting progressively more violent, that Abraham Lincoln first rose to national prominence via his highly publicized 1858 debates with Douglas. As of 1854, Lincoln was back at his law practice, his political ambitions seemingly a thing of the past, but Douglas’s action led him to change. “I was losing interest in politics,” Lincoln wrote in 1859, “when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.” 31
Some scholars believe his desire to bring about slavery’s eventual end was genuine and heartfelt. Some say he merely opposed slavery for economic reasons. Others say he just read the political tea leaves and acted based on ruthless opportunism. But just as he said, what he did after 1854 is pretty well known. The fight against the spread of slavery would define the rest of his life.
St. George’s Episcopal Church, whose Civil War ghost stories precede the war itself, as it appeared in 1864 when it was serving as a hospital for soldiers. It’s a common hub for local ghostlore today. Courtesy Library of Congress.
Lincoln, Douglas, and
Lincoln’s Rise to the Presidency
There were some ghost stories coming up in the world as the country slipped toward war; the first Civil War ghosts are said to have appeared before the states even began to secede. One story about St. George’s Episcopal Church in Fredericksburg goes clear to 1858: according to legend, a singer in the choir came into the chapel one night that year and found it lit only by two candles. When her eyes became accustomed to the low light, she saw a woman in white rise from prayer in front of the church and float up, turning to show a desperately worried expression before vanishing. Could the ghost have known what was in store for Virginia? 32
While Douglas was laying his groundwork to become president himself (it’s widely held that all of his apparent friendliness toward slavery, despite being a Northerner himself, was simply a method to ingratiate himself to Southern voters), Abraham Lincoln was vying to take over Douglas’s job as a United States Senator. In 1858, it was known that if the new Republican party could take control of the state legislature, Lincoln would be the man appointed to the Senate.
In the run-up to the local elections of 1858, when the Virginia ghost was said to have appeared, Douglas and Lincoln embarked on their famous series of debates, speaking before huge crowds in each of the seven Illinois cities they squared off in. Each side hired a stenographer, and their speeches were republished all over the country. They attracted no small amount of national attention (it was generally assumed that if Douglas held onto his job in the Senate, he’d be nominated for president by the Democrats in 1860), and many saw the whole exercise as a triumph of the American system—a series of substantive debates by expert speakers that could be read by people all over, and gave the constituents a chance to become better informed on the issues.
Again, people tend to downplay the role of slavery in these debates today, some claiming that the only issue they debated was whether slavery should be confined to the South, as Lincoln wanted, or allowed to expand based on popular votes in new territories, as Douglas did. But, in fact, the long debates covered a multitude of topics, including the basic idea of slavery in and of itself, and the idea that the nation could, in Lincoln’s words, “permanently endure half slave and half free.”
Lincoln made it clear throughout the debates that he was opposed to the very idea of slavery itself. However, he was not an “abolitionist,” and stopped short of saying that the government should put an end to it. He believed that slavery was legal in the states where it already existed, and that the federal government had no right to change those laws. He could only hope that slavery would die out on its own if it was contained in the southern states, which he estimated would take about a hundred years. It’s sometimes said today that Lincoln should have pushed for a plan in which the government would simply buy all the slaves and free them, which may have cost less than the war eventually did, but this ignores the fact that many slave owners never, ever would have agreed to this plan. Anyone who even suggested such a course of action would have been regarded as far too radical to be elected.
Douglas talked Lincoln into several corners during the debates by portraying him as anti-white, leading Lincoln to make a number of now-infamous statements that he had never claimed that blacks and whites were equal or that they should be allowed to intermarry. It’s true that we can’t possibly say that Lincoln was the most progressive guy in the world in terms of race; more liberal senators, such as Charles Sumner and Lyman Trumbull, were endlessly frustrated with Lincoln’s middle-of-the-road stance on slavery. However, in fairness, it’s worth noting that Lincoln made these statements while speaking to rural Illinois voters, who may have been against slavery (more or less), but weren’t exactly against it due to any forward-thinking views on race. Laws restricting the rights of non-white people in Illinois tended to pass by huge margins, and these were the voters Lincoln needed to give his party control of the state legislature. He had to remain constantly on guard against charges that he was anti-white. Such is democracy—whatever Lincoln’s private views were, he had to present the sort of public policy that voters would find acceptable. For his part, he said that rules about intermarriage and black rights should be local issues that each town and state should decide on their own, leading to a sly joke that if Douglas was so afraid of black rights, he had better come back to local government.
Still, whether he was backed into a corner or not, some of what Lincoln said in those debates (and in occasional letters and talks) do remind us that Lincoln wasn’t perfect. Besides some badly outdated comments on race, one could fairly claim that the man was a lousy businessman, a distant and distracted father, and that he had a real knack for picking lousy generals to lead his army. (He had some pretty bad generals in charge before he got around to the more-effective Grant and Sherman, who, of course, still had issues of their own).
Still, Lincoln’s stated views on race during the debates (and throughout his life) were not necessarily excusable, but they were politically savvy, and it could probably be argued of every bad thing Lincoln said or did, that if he hadn’t said or done it, slavery would not have been brought to an end in 1865. It may very well not have happened if the war had been shorter or with anyone else in the White House.
In fact, the notion of actually ending slavery outright in 1858 seemed about as plausible as ending gun ownership outright seems today. People might get paranoid that it could happen, but even simple laws putting restrictions on gun sales are basically impossible to push through. The same was true of slavery then; even the weakest restriction was likely to be denounced as a radical intrusion on the rights of the slave states.
Rather than making strong statements about slavery at a time when it could have sparked a backlash that set the whole movement back, Lincoln played “the long game.” Had Trumbull, Sumner, or one of the other anti-slavery hawks ever been elected president (which they almost certainly couldn’t have been), they would probably not have been able to push the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress, as Lincoln ultimately did. Perhaps no one could have. And perhaps Lincoln even knew what he was playing for all along; in the handful of photographs of him in which he’s smiling, one can imagine that there’s a look about him as though he knows something other people don’t.
If I sound like I’m on a bit of a rant here, it’s because I am. Lincoln’s views on race, slavery, and everything else are so widely misrepresented these days—by both the left and the right—that I often feel as though I need to defend his honor, even while I’m building up to examining the provenance of stories about him riding on a flying piano. And though there are certainly those who will say I’m exaggerating the role of slavery in the conflict between the states at the time, it’s difficult to read newspapers of the day and come away with the impression that there was any other issue facing the nation at all. Slavery and the abolition movement were pretty much all they talked about in papers in those days when they spoke of the impending crisis.
But it’s true that Lincoln was not an abolitionist, per se. Abolitionists were regarded as dangerous radicals who did more harm than good to the anti-slavery cause in those days, and some believed that simply ending slavery outright would do more harm than good for the people in bondage. After all, there were some four million slaves, few of whom had any education—what would become of them if slavery were ended all at once? Would they really be better off? By treating them as property and investments, wasn’t it in the owners’ best interest to keep them healthy, whereas the people hired to build the railroads and factories could be treated as disposable? To even suggest that there was an upside to slavery is indefensible today (and saying that employers had to own the employees in order to want to keep them alive is certainly no compliment to them), but all of these arguments made sense to many people at the time, even those who thought that slavery was an embarrassment, at best.
In this sort of world, it was Lincoln’s middle-of-the-road view on how slavery should be handled that got him nominated for president in 1860, an event that may have only been possible in Chicago.
The 16th President
Lincoln helped the Republicans do well in the state elections in 1858 but not well enough to swing control of the state legislature over to the party, which kept him from getting Douglas’s Senate seat. He ended up back in Springfield, practicing law with William Herndon and raising his children with Mary.
Still, the debates brought him a measure of national fame, and he became a popular speaker, traveling clear to the East Coast to give speeches. When 1860 came, bringing with it another presidential election, he was occasionally spoken of as a possible candidate.
The Democrats met for their own convention that year in Charleston, South Carolina, with no intention of renominating the sitting Democratic president, James Buchanan, and with everyone expecting the nomination to go to Douglas. But the slavery question had become so heated that it was splitting the Democratic party in two. After several ballots, Stephen Douglas had received more votes than everyone else every time, but never enough of a majority to officially secure the nomination. Southern delegates simply didn’t think him pro-slavery enough; Lincoln had set something of a trap for him in the debates by getting him to say that if voters in the new territories could vote to allow slavery, they could also vote to outlaw it. That may seem like common sense, but saying so out loud was enough to make Douglas look like an enemy of the South in those days.
When no candidate had enough votes to be nominated after fifty-seven ballots (largely because the southern delegates had left in disgust, and there weren’t enough votes still being cast for anyone to reach the requisite number), the party eventually gave up and closed the convention, reconvening six weeks later in Baltimore, where Douglas was quickly nominated. But the southern delegates who had “bolted” held another convention of their own, nominating Vice President John Breckinridge as their candidate, so there would be two Democratic candidates running for president that year, splitting the democratic vote.
Meanwhile, a third party had come into existence: an alliance of former members of the Whig and Know-Nothing parties, along with a few of the handful of southern democrats who opposed the idea of seceding from the Union, formed the Constitutional Union Party, which hoped to simply ignore the slavery question by taking no firm stance on it one way or the other. They nominated John Bell, a former Speaker of the House, Secretary of War, and senator, for president and Edward Everett for vice president (Everett would be remembered for giving a two-hour speech right before Lincoln’s famously brief address at Gettysburg—few remember that he’d been a rival candidate in the election of 1860).
The Republicans, meanwhile, met in Chicago, with most observers expecting Sen. William Seward to be nominated.
But Seward’s nomination was not the foregone conclusion some believed it to be; many voters feared that Seward’s strong anti-slavery views made him unelectable. Behind the scenes, Lincoln’s supporters had made a strong push among delegates to make Lincoln their second choice. One of Lincoln’s supporters made the brilliant move of bringing in some actual rails that Lincoln himself had supposedly split thirty years before; the “western rail splitter who made good” image was critical at a time when slavery defenders were scoring points by claiming that the “wage slavery” and rampant unemployment of the North was an even worse system for menial laborers than slavery. Lincoln’s story showed that the system worked: in a free society, citizens could improve their lot in life.
Though his actual time in Chicago had been limited, Illinois was Lincoln’s home turf. He was promoted by the Chicago Tribune and the Republican Wigwam, and the stadium built just for the convention was packed with local supporters who promoted him so loudly that the sheer volume of their voices became the stuff of legend. This gave him just enough of an advantage to carry the day and win the nomination when it became clear that Seward didn’t have enough support.
Lincoln was reasonably famous by then, but still obscure enough that many papers apparently still didn’t even know if his name was “Abraham” or “Abram.” Among the other candidates in the running, and compared to every previous president, Lincoln’s resume makes him seem terribly out of place. Though we’d had one western log cabin-born president before (William Henry Harrison), Lincoln was not a former senator, governor, Founding Father, or war hero. He was just a guy who made good speeches and seemed to be in just the right place at just the right time, to a degree that one could practically call supernatural all by itself.
Lincoln’s middle-of-the-road view on slavery was not regarded as middle-of-the-road in the South, though. Keeping slavery contained where it was meant blocking it from expanding into Mexico, South America, Central America, and Cuba (all of which the South had talked about bringing in as slave states, with varying degrees of seriousness, at times). With this policy, the South couldn’t help but notice that it could soon be badly outnumbered in Congress, helpless to block new amendments if all of the non-slave states ganged up on them.
After all, this election showed that a man could be elected president without any approval from the South at all. Abner Doubleday, an officer stationed at Fort Sumter, off the coast of South Carolina, claimed that he was the only man in the vicinity who would admit to voting for Lincoln. (Doubleday never claimed to invent baseball, though his delightful memoir gives one the impression that he would have been glad to take credit for it.)
Lincoln received less than 40 percent of the popular vote nationwide. He got far more votes than any of the other three candidates, though; the Democrats were split, and the “old gentlemen” of the Constitutional Union Party, which barely had a delegate under sixty, didn’t inspire nearly the enthusiasm that was seen among Lincoln’s supporters. That’s why 39 percent was enough to win the election handily that year. Lincoln won 180 of the 303 electoral votes and received a very comfortable 54 percent of the popular vote in free states.
But as soon as the election results were in, people began claiming to have dark premonitions about Lincoln’s future.
He even appears to have had more than one of his own before he even arrived in Washington.
The Two Lincolns in the Mirror
In an 1885 letter, William Herndon spoke of Lincoln having strange presentiments and visions during his Springfield years. “He … said to me more than once, ‘Billy, I feel as if I shall meet with some terrible end.’ He did not know what would strike him, nor when, nor where, nor how hard; he was a blind intellectual Sampson, struggling and fighting in the dark against the fates. I say on my own personal observation that he felt this for years.” 33
Maybe this was just Lincoln being depressed or fatalistic, but he does seem to have spoken about seeing visions and dreams that may have portended a dark fate.
According to a now-common tale, on the day of his election, Lincoln looked into a mirror in his Springfield home and saw something mysterious: two images of his face, one plain, and one faded. Legend has it that he took this as an omen that he would go on to win a second term (a feat no one had accomplished in a generation, since Andrew Jackson), but that he would not survive it.
While there’s some debate over whether it was Abraham or Mary who saw the “vision” as a grim omen of the future, the story does seem to be true, in the main. Two different sources later spoke of the story—Noah Brooks, a journalist and friend of Lincoln repeated the story in 1865, and Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s bodyguard, told the story some years later.
By sheer merit of being published earlier, Noah Brooks’s version of the story is probably the most reliable. His account was written just days after Lincoln’s assassination and was published in the June 1865 issue of Harper’s. According to Brooks, Lincoln had told him the story in November 1864, just after the general election. Brooks wrote that he had attempted to put down on paper the story “as nearly as possible in his (Lincoln’s) own words.”
This is how he quoted Lincoln:
It was just after my election in 1860, when the news had been coming in thick and fast all day, and there had been a great “Hurrah, boys!” so that I was well tired out, and went home to rest, throwing myself down on a lounge in my chamber.
Opposite where I lay was a bureau with a swinging-glass upon it (and here he got up
and placed furniture to illustrate the position)
and looking in that glass, I saw myself reflected,
nearly at full length; but my face, I noticed, had
two separate faces and distinct images, the tip
of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, and got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished. On lying down again I saw it a second time—plainer, if possible, than before; and then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler, say five shades, than the other.
I got up and the thing melted away, and I went off and, in the excitement of the hour, forgot all about it—nearly, but not quite, for the thing would once in a while come up, and give me a little pang, as though something uncomfortable had happened.
When I went home I told my wife about it, and a few days after I tried the experiment again, and (with a laugh) sure enough, the thing came again, but I never succeeded in bringing the ghost back after that, though I once tried very industriously to show it to my wife, who was worried about it somewhat. She thought it was “a sign” that I was to be elected to a second term in office, and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not see life through the last term.34
A quick reading here makes it look as though it wasn’t so much a “vision” as an optical illusion—created, perhaps, by having the light from a nearby window hitting the mirror just right or by the mirror simply being warped. But seeing as how Mary’s view of the case was exactly what happened—Lincoln was re-elected, but didn’t survive the second term—it’s difficult not to view it as a grim portent of things to come.
Brooks wrote of the dream very shortly after Lincoln’s death, less than a year after he would have heard the story, though close to five years after the actual event. He cautioned against making too much of it, though: “The president, with his usual good sense, saw nothing in all this but an optical illusion,” he wrote, “though the flavor of superstition which hangs about every man’s composition made him wish he had never seen it. But there are people who will now believe that this odd coincidence was ‘a warning.’”
The other version of the mirror story comes from Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s bodyguard. Lamon said that Lincoln had told him the story just after he was nominated for a second term (which would make it a few months before he would have told it to Brooks), though he didn’t repeat the story until much later than Brooks did.
Lamon’s version of the story is also worth repeating in full (with emphasis added to highlight the minor differences in the way it was told to Brooks). He had told a version of it in 1887; this version comes from his daughter’s edited edition of his memories of Lincoln published in 1911:
On the day of his renomination at Baltimore, Mr. Lincoln was engaged at the War Department in constant telegraphic communication with General Grant, who was then in front of Richmond.Throughout the day he seemed wholly unconscious that anything was going on at Baltimore in which his interests were in any way concerned. At luncheon time he went to the White House, swallowed a hasty lunch, and without entering his private office hurried back to the War Office. On his arrival at the War Department the first dispatch that was shown him announced the nomination of Andrew Johnson for Vice-President.
“This is strange,” said he, reflectively; “I thought it was usual to nominate the candidate for President first.”
His informant was astonished. “Mr. President,” said he, “have you not heard of your own renomination? It was telegraphed to you at the White House two hours ago.”
Mr. Lincoln had not seen the dispatch, had made no inquiry about it, had not even thought about it. On reflection, he attached great importance to this singular occurrence. It reminded him, he said, of an ominous incident of mysterious character which occurred just after his election in 1860. It was the double image of himself in a looking-glass, which he saw while lying on a lounge in his own chamber at Springfield. There was Abraham Lincoln’s face reflecting the full glow of health and hopeful life; and in the same mirror, at the same moment of time, was the face of Abraham Lincoln showing a ghostly paleness. On trying the experiment at other times, as confirmatory tests, the illusion reappeared, and then vanished as before.
Mr. Lincoln more than once told me that he could not explain this phenomenon; that he had tried to reproduce the double reflection at the Executive Mansion, but without success; that it had worried him not a little; and that the mystery had its meaning, which was clear enough to him. To his mind the illusion was a sign—the life-like image betokening a safe passage through his first term as President; the ghostly one, that death would overtake him before the close of the second35
The differences in the tellings are minor but significant—in Brooks’s version, it was Mary who saw the vision as a sign, and in Lamon’s, it was Abraham himself. This could perhaps be chalked up to simply the minor ways Lincoln personally changed the story around, depending on who he was telling the story to, or it could simply be down to the personal prejudices and beliefs of Brooks and Lamon themselves and how they wished to portray Lincoln. Lamon always said that Lincoln believed in dreams. Brooks spoke of the president’s “good sense” about superstitions and said that it was Mary who saw it as a sign (though, like many early biographers, Brooks had little good to say about Mary).
Some still believe that the vision was a true omen whether Lincoln actually believed that it was or not. Paranormal author Hans Holzer even wrote that what had happened was that Lincoln experienced a psychic phenomena in which “the inner or true self has quickly slipped out … what the President saw was a brief out-of-the-body experience … which is not an uncommon psychic experience.” 36
To me, the story always sounded simply as though Lincoln had seen an optical illusion in the mirror, not necessarily a supernatural vision, perhaps caused by seeing in the mirror both his direct reflection and a reflection of a window in which he was also being reflected. Notably, the effect could be reproduced in the same mirror occasionally (though Lincoln wasn’t around Springfield long enough after his election to make too many attempts), but apparently not in other mirrors, such as those at the White House. One can infer that the mirror had to be set up in just the right place, and positioned at just the right angle (it was specifically referred to as a “swinging” mirror) and, perhaps, that the light from the window had to be just right, as well.
In 2013, I arranged to tour the Lincoln home in Springfield, and arrived with a large mirror in hand to see if I could reproduce the effect. I was met by Susan Haake, the amiable curator of the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, who gave me a tour of the premises (including the outhouse—a three-holer) and helped to try to triangulate where the mirror might have been in 1860.
The exterior of Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois. Courtesy Library of Congress.
Unfortunately, attempts to directly reproduce the effect by placing a mirror in just the right spot are not really possible. Exactly which room Lincoln would have been in at the time is difficult to determine (references to “my chamber” could be the bedroom or the living room or any number of places), and how the furniture was laid out in most of the rooms back in Lincoln’s day isn’t really known. A few rooms can be reproduced fairly well based on drawings that appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, but no record really exists of how most of the place was laid out in 1860. There is a chest of drawers belonging to Lincoln that was returned to the house in the 1970s, and some existing holes in it show that a swinging mirror could have been attached, but it isn’t attached anymore, and exactly where the chest might have been in 1860 is anyone’s guess (though the staff’s guess is that it would have been in Lincoln’s own bedroom. He and Mary were in separate rooms, as was common at the time.) Even carrying around a mirror of my own, though, I was unable to reproduce the effect.
So, exactly where the mirror was at the time is a mystery—as is the location of the mirror itself today, which disappeared from the record eventually. It’s tempting to imagine that somewhere, someone has an antique mirror and has no idea that it once belonged to the Lincolns, and that it was in their mirror that Lincoln saw a vision of his future.
More Premonitions
Of course, this was probably not the only premonition of Lincoln’s not surviving his presidency made just after the election. Lots of people claimed to predict his death, both based on psychic hunches and on more practical evidence, and continued to do so throughout his presidency.
That Lincoln himself suspected that he might not survive to see Springfield again can be seen in a line in his farewell address at the railroad depot in February 1861, as he journeyed off to assume the presidency: “Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young man to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return … ”
Lincoln probably didn’t actually speak that line out loud. The version of the speech recorded by a reporter for the Illinois State Journal simply quotes the president-elect as saying, “Today I leave you,” though toward the end of the speech he said, “With these few words I must leave you—for how long I know not.”
But the quote about not knowing whether he would return was, without question, Lincoln’s own, even if he didn’t actually vocalize it that day. It comes from the “official” version of the speech, which Lincoln dictated to his secretary, John Nicolay, on the train as he traveled away (one can tell from the jerky and disjointed handwriting on the still-extant copy at the Library of Congress that it was copied down while the train was in motion). It may have been edited and revised a bit from the speech he actually gave, but the sentiment is certainly that of Lincoln himself. Whether he was feeling a presentiment that he might not survive or was simply being practical (it was the eve of his fifty-second birthday, and that a person under great mental strain may not live another eight years in those days wasn’t an unreasonable guess), we can only speculate.
Perhaps the idea that he would never return to Illinois had been impressed on his mind after his final meeting with his stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston-Lincoln, who supposedly had a premonition of her own that she would never see her stepson again upon his election.
According to Ward Hill Lamon’s 1872 biography of Lincoln, shortly around February 1, 1861, roughly a week and a half before his journey to Washington, Lincoln went to visit his stepmother, in company with his cousin Dennis Hanks and one Col. Augustus Chapman (whose wife, Harriet, was granddaughter of Mrs. Lincoln). After some difficulty in crossing the icy Kickapoo River, they arrived at her home in Farmington, where “she fondled him as her own ‘Abe’ and he her as his own mother.”
In the course of the visit, they stopped at the unmarked, “utterly neglected” spot where Lincoln’s father was buried, and Lincoln began to make arrangements for a stone to be erected on the site (though Lincoln was never able to follow through on the plan; there was no memorial in place as of 1872, when the biography was written, and it remained unmarked until 1880).37
According to Lamon’s retelling, when Lincoln parted from his stepmother for the last time, she would “never be permitted to see him again,” for she felt that his enemies would assassinate him. He replied, ‘No, no, mamma. They will not do that. Trust in the Lord, and all will be well: we will see each other again.’ ” 38
Indeed, Lamon noted that fears of Lincoln’s assassination, if not actual premonitions, were “shared by very many of his neighbors at Springfield; and the friendly warnings he received were as numerous as they were silly and gratuitous. Every conceivable precaution was suggested: some thought the (railroad) cars might be thrown from the track; some thought he would be surrounded and stabbed in some great crowd; others thought he might be shot from a housetop as he rode up Pennsylvania Avenue on inauguration day; and others still were sure he would be quietly poisoned long before the fourth of March (inauguration day). One gentleman insisted that he ought, in common prudence, to take his cook with him from Springfield—one from ‘among his own female friends.’” 39
William Herndon, the law partner and biographer, went to visit Mrs. Lincoln at her home in September 1865, only months after the assassination, to interview her. According to Herndon’s notes on the interview (which reveal a number of odd capitalization choices), she said:
I did not want Abe to run for Presdt—did not want him Elected—was afraid Somehow or other—felt it in my heart that Something would happen him and when he came down to see me after he was Elected Presdt I still felt that Something told me that Something would befall Abe and that I should see him no more.40
Again, this interview took place five years after the actual meeting took place, and a few months after the assassination, making it an “after the fact” premonition, but it was recorded very close after the event, and seems to have been backed up by people who probably were present and didn’t have access to Herndon’s notes. Of course, some have suggested that Mrs. Lincoln was a touch senile by this time (if only to explain why she gave away such priceless relics as young Lincoln’s famous “sums book”), and at the end of the interview with Herndon, she apparently made a similar grim prediction about Herndon himself. According to his notes:
When I was about to leave she arose—took me by the hand—wept—and bade me goodby—Saying I shall never see you again.41
So perhaps we have to take into account the possibility that saying “I will never see you again” may have just been something old Mrs. Lincoln did every time she said good-bye to anyone.
Herndon himself had spoken with Abraham Lincoln just before he journeyed to Washington, and Lincoln had promised that after his presidency they’d go on practicing law together as though nothing had ever happened, though he qualified the statement by adding, “If I live.” 42
Speaking at Independence Hall in Philadelphia en route to Washington, Lincoln made even further ominous statements. Speaking of the rift in the Union, he spoke of the words that had been adopted in that very hall in 1776, stating that the Declaration of Independence “was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the mother land, but … hope … which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance,” and said that if the Union cannot be saved without upholding that principle, he “would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender to it.” 43 It was an eerie line for people to remember a few years later.
As Lincoln traveled toward Washington, it was clear that there were dark days ahead for him, for his family, and for the United States of America, and no premonitions were necessary to know it. Fears that Lincoln was facing a danger of assassination in 1860 were not unfounded. Between his election and his journey to Washington, the states of South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia had all seceded from the Union, and rumors of assassination attempts were rampant. He snuck into Washington on a train from Baltimore in secrecy (having secretly switched trains on the advice of detective Allan Pinkerton), disguised in an overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat, accompanied by Pinkerton and Ward Hill Lamon. There was no waiting crowd—only a single friend—to greet him when he arrived in the capital. “There was never a moment,” Lamon wrote, “from the day he crossed the Maryland line, up to the time of his death, that he was not in danger of death by assassination.” 44
Of course, one shouldn’t make too much of these presentiments; Lincoln certainly didn’t. He was making plans for reconstruction, the next step after the war, right up to the end of his presidency, and surprised many with a final speech expressing support for giving at least some of the freed slaves the vote (a sentiment that was regarded as quite radical at the time). And that the war would take a toll on him may not have been a presentiment so much as common sense.
Indeed, many of the predictions one can point to seem more rooted in people being honest about the cost of a war than in supernatural hunches.
Stephen Douglas, who was nearing the very end of his life by the end of the 1860 campaign, made a prediction of his own that later seemed like a prophecy. Visiting with Gen. Charles Stewart on New Year’s Day 1861, he said, “Virginia, over yonder across the Potomac, will become a charnel-house … Washington will become a city of hospitals, the churches will be used for the sick and wounded. This house, the Minnesota block, will be devoted to that purpose before the end of the war.”
He was right in every particular.45 Indeed, he seemed to intuit more than others just how bad the war would be. He and Lincoln became closer in the early days of the Lincoln presidency, to the point that some spoke of him being brought into the cabinet. After the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, officially turning the conflict violent, Lincoln drafted a call for 75,000 volunteers to fight. Douglas looked it over and said he suggested 200,000 instead.46
Douglas himself died only weeks later, worn to death by his own campaign, but apparently bearing no ill will to his old friend and rival. A couple of newspapers reported that he held Lincoln’s hat for him at the inauguration. His efforts on behalf of the Union in the last months of his life don’t excuse all of his politics, but they help his reputation a great deal, and, just like Lincoln, it could be said that even his mistakes had to happen, or the war that ended slavery might not have happened. It’s easy to begin to see a grand design in these things sometimes.
Even Robert E. Lee, upon resigning from the United States Army to join the Confederacy, expressed sentiments like this. Lee didn’t really believe that the southern states had the right to secede, and said that slavery was a moral and political evil (though he owned slaves himself). Like many who didn’t care for slavery on principle at the time, he believed it was God’s will, and would end when God willed it to. And right from the start, he saw grand designs in the war he fought not because he agreed with the politics, but to defend his home state of Virginia. Though no one ever accused him of giving less than his best for the cause, he suggested that the bloody war might be God’s punishment for slavery. In a May 1861 letter to a woman who had asked for his picture, days after rejecting an offer to command the Union army, Lee wrote that “Wherever the blame may be … I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children … I should like, above all things, that our difficulties might be peaceably arranged, and still trust that a merciful God, whom I know will not unnecessarily afflict us, may yet allay the fury for war. Whatever may be the result of the contest, I foresee that the country will have to pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation, perhaps, of our national sins.” 47, 48
Lincoln’s Wartime Premonitions
Even months into his presidency, Lincoln spoke about premonitions of his own that he would not survive his days in the White House. In fact, he seems to have done so repeatedly throughout his time in office.
In 1862, Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, at the White House. Her book about escaping slaves had galvanized the North and cut through the widely held belief that slaves were perfectly happy and content with their lot in life, and Lincoln supposedly greeted her by calling her “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” That particular quote didn’t appear for years after the fact, and only came from second-hand sources, but in an 1864 article, Stowe herself wrote that Lincoln predicted his own death when she met him. According to Stowe, Lincoln told her that, “whichever way (the war) ends, I have the impression that I shan’t last long after it’s over.” 49
Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s painting; it was during his period of work on it that he heard Lincoln mention his presentiment. Carpenter spent several months in the White House working on the painting; though people (then as now) criticized the proclamation as a sort of mealy-mouthed measure, Lincoln knew it would be part of his eventual legacy, a first major step toward the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery officially. Courtesy Library of Congress.
This anecdote is particularly important. While Lincoln made several statements that sounded ominous in speeches, stories of him having actual premonitions of a grim fate were almost all first told in public after they had already come true. This one was published in early January 1864, when Lincoln was still alive and well. The fact that one of them, at least, was published so early makes the various other stories about him saying things like this far more believable.
Lincoln seems to have made another such statement a few months after he met with Stowe. Francis Bicknell Carpenter, a painter, was introduced to Lincoln by Owen Lovejoy, a mutual friend, in February 1864, when he came to town to spend six months working on a painting of Lincoln’s first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. Carpenter said that Lincoln met Lovejoy, who was slowly dying, frequently during this time, and stated in an 1866 recollection that Lincoln once told Lovejoy: “This war is eating my life out; I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see the end.” 50 If the quote is accurate, it would have been made in either February or March of 1864; Lovejoy died in Brooklyn on March 25.
Yet another such prediction would have been made only months later and was published only days after the assassination. Within a week after Lincoln died, a Boston Journal correspondent said that in July 1864, he’d told Lincoln once that he never doubted that the Union would triumph in the end, and Lincoln had replied with “Neither have I, but I may not live to see it. I feel a presentiment that I shall not outlast the rebellion. When it is over, my work will be done.” 51
As close as it comes to the event in question, though, we have to qualify this one a bit: it wasn’t printed until after the fact, and could have just been the reporter promoting a common belief at the time that ending slavery was Lincoln’s job, and that he had been killed because God needed someone who would be harder on the South to see the nation through reconstruction. Lincoln’s “malice toward none, charity toward all” policies had plenty of opponents, even among his strongest supporters.
Lincoln is also sometimes quoted as saying that “I have a presentiment that God will call me to him through the hand of an assassin. Let his will, not mine, be done … So many plots have already been made against my life, that it is a real miracle that they have all failed, when we consider that the great majority of them were in the hands of skillful Roman Catholic murderers, evidently trained by Jesuits. But can we expect that God will make a perpetual miracle to save my life? I believe not.” 52
The last lines, in particular, are quoted now and then today. However, an examination of the source of the lines casts a lot of doubt on the entire quote’s veracity. Lincoln was quoted as saying this in an 1886 book by Father Charles Chiniquy, a former priest who left the church and believed that the entire Civil War was part of the Catholic plot to take over the United States. In the book, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, the quote appears as part of a very, very, long conversation with Lincoln that he purports to quote verbatim. The sheer length of the conversation, most of which is about Catholic conspiracies, would make it nearly impossible that Chiniquy could have remembered it all twenty minutes after it happened, let alone twenty years. Like many Lincoln biographers of the era, he wanted to make it perfectly clear that Lincoln agreed with all of his own philosophies and theories, no matter how far out they got.
Chiniquy would go on to claim that the eventual assassination in 1865 had been orchestrated by the Pope as revenge on Lincoln for having defended him (Chiniquy) in court in 1856. It takes a certain amount of arrogance to imagine that the Pope had a president assassinated because you had hired him once, and Chiniquy’s surviving correspondence to Lincoln53 doesn’t give the impression that they were anywhere near as close as Chiniquy was claiming they had been by the 1880s.
Though Chiniquy’s story doesn’t seem to check out, that Lincoln was giving to predict his own death does seem well established. Whether these were really premonitions or Lincoln’s own assessment of the war’s toll on him is another matter. With constant news about casualties, it’s easy to imagine how Lincoln would have had death on his mind.
Everyone else, did, after all.
And in such a world of death, the market was ripe for mediums, clairvoyants, and spiritualists.
21. Buffalo Courier, July 21, 1860.
22. Zella Armstrong, The History of Hamilton County and Chattanooga, Tennessee, Volume 1 (Chattanooga, TN: The Lookout Publishing Co., 1931).
23. “Letter from a Tourist, Look Out Mountain House Near Chattanooga, TN, August 1860,” Charleston Mercury (Charleston, SC), September 27, 1860.
24. Chicago Times, quoted in The Constitution (Washington, DC), August 18, 1860.
25. Editorial credited to “Rip Van Winkle,” Boston Herald, July 30, 1860.
26. Sacramento Union quoted in “More About the Meteor,” New York Herald, July 24, 1860.
27. Speech of Hon. Stephen A. Douglas on Measures of Adjustment, Delivering in the City Hall, Chicago, October 23, 1850. (New York: Jared W. Bell, 1851).
28. The new jail and criminal court buildings, where nearly 100 men would be hanged and where such criminals as Leopold and Loeb would later betried, was built on the site of the “melee.”
29. “The North Side: It Rejoices in a Public Building,” Chicago Tribune, February 16, 1874.
30. “Border Ruffian Sexton Robbing Graves,” Chicago Tribune, November 9, 1857.
31. Lincoln letter to Jesse Fell, printed in 1859 newspapers.
32. L. B. Taylor, The Ghosts of Fredericksburg (Williamsburg, VA: Progress Printing Company, 1991). the story is alluded to in some earlier sources
33. Herndon, William. “Letter from Lincoln’s Old Law Partner,” Religion-Philosophical Journal, December 12, 1885.
34. Noah Brooks, “Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume XXXI, June–November, 1865.
35. Ward Hill Lamon, edited by Dorothy Lamon Teillard. Recollections of Abraham Lincoln. “Published by the Editor” Washington, DC, 1911.
36. Hans Holzer, Famous Ghosts (New York: Black Dog and Leventhal, 2012).
37. Ward Hill Lamon, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, from His Birth to His Inauguration as President (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1872).
38. Augustus Chapman to William Herndon, October 8, 1865.
39. Ward Hill Lamon, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, from His Birth to His Inauguration as President (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1872).
40. Douglas L. Wilson, ed.; Rodney O. Davis, ed.; Sarah Bush Lincoln, “Sarah Bush Lincoln” (William H. Herndon Interview). Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements About Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
41. ibid.
42. Herndon’s Lincoln.
43. Herndon’s Lincoln.
44. Ward Hill Lamon, edited by Dorothy Lamon Teillard. Recollections of Abraham Lincoln. “Published by the Editor,” Washington, DC, 1911.
45. Isaac Newton Arnold, Life of Abraham Lincoln. McClurg and Co, Chicago, 1885.
46. George Ashmun to Isaac N. Arnold, October 16, 1864, reprinted in the Springfield Republican, October 26, 1864.
47. “The Rebel Gen. Lee,” New York Times August 6, 1861. The letter also appeared in The Macon Telegraph and other publications that week, though it didn’t appear in a book until the 1930s. No one seems to have questioned its authenticity, as it does sound like the sort of thing Lee would say (in an era when his persona wasn’t as well known), but it seems odd to me that his most eloquent explanation for the side he chose was in a letter to a young admirer who asked for his photograph.
48. Some versions of the quote about “our national sins” contain an accurate prediction that “if it comes to a conflict of arms, the war will last at least four years,” but that part is absent from the copies of the letter I found. According to a number of 1870s books, Lee’s “four years” prediction allegedly came from an interview a “gentleman of New York” working on behalf of union general Scott conducted with Lee around the same time as the letter. The two quotes are often erroneously mashed up together.
49. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Abraham Lincoln,” written for the January 7, 1864, issue of The Christian Watchman and Reflector, quoted here from a reprint in Littel’s Living Age, February 1864.
50. Francis B. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866).
51. Reprinted here from “Recollections of President Lincoln.” Springfield Republican (Springfield, MA), April 18, 1865.
52. Charles Chiniquy, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome (New York: Fleming H. Revel Co, 1886).
53. Two letters in the Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.