On January 30th, 1862, a strange ship was launched in Green Point Wharf. An ironclad battleship powered by steam and armed with guns mounted in a rotating turret, the Monitor was the Union’s answer to the Merrimack, the fearsome Confederate ironclad that was under construction in the South. The Confederate ship hadn’t been completed, but the Union knew it was coming. President Lincoln had overruled the Navy officials who believed it would never float, and wanted the ability to fight an ironclad with an ironclad. Even today, the Monitor looks like a bizarre craft, with only about eighteen inches of it visible above the water, not counting the gun turret. It would eventually be compared to a cheese box floating on a raft.
It was a strange time that called for strange solutions.
Few of the most famous battles of the Civil War had yet been fought. The battles of Fort Sumter and Bull Run (aka Manassas) had shown people that this war between Northern and Southern states was not going to be a mere thirty-day dust-up, but the bloodiest battles—those that would end with tens of thousands of casualties—were still to come. In many ways, the launching of the Monitor marked the war’s passage from an old-fashioned war to a modern one. As soon is it took to the water, every wooden navy in the world was obsolete. The arms race that followed as nations began to update their military would boil over into the First World War half a century later.
Meanwhile, that same month, January of 1862, actor John Wilkes Booth was lodging at the Tremont House hotel in Chicago. Abraham Lincoln stayed there when he was in town, too; he had given a version of his “House Divided” speech from the balcony in 1858 and held a public reception in the lobby after his election in 1860. Now Booth was making his home there while playing a highly successful run of shows at the nearby McVicker’s Theatre. During that cold winter, he starred in a different play nightly, appearing as characters such as Richard III (who kills his way to the throne), and Hamlet (who spends the whole play plotting to kill the king).
On the day the Monitor was launched, Booth took a break from Shakespeare and played Duke Pescara in The Apostate, an 1817 melodrama by Richard Sheil that was already nearly forgotten in 1862. The Duke was one of Booth’s father’s old roles, and is a consummate melodrama villain who seems as though he ought to be curling his mustache every time he talks. Consider the scene in which he bids Florinda to agree to marry him so he’ll stop torturing her lover:
I’ll hunt for life in every trembling limb,
and chase it down. The driving steel shall plunge—Nay, do not stop your ears, for his shrill screams
shall pierce the solid deafness of the tomb.
… Look there, look there! He dies! See where he dies!
The wheel goes round—see, the red froth of blood!
His hair stands up, and drips with agony!1
The play isn’t as bad as it’s sometimes made out to be today (it’s pretty entertaining once it gets going, especially if you read Pescara’s lines in a Darth Vader voice), but it’s seldom read anymore, probably hasn’t been performed in years, and is really only remembered because of Booth’s connection to it. He played the same role in Albany, New York, the night Lincoln came through en route to Washington a year before, and he would play it again in 1865 in his last performance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington.
The night after he appeared in The Apostate, Booth played a regicidal role that has aged better, and which the Chicago Tribune said was his personal favorite: Macbeth.2
Besides just the choice in Chicago hotels, Lincoln and Booth had another thing in common: Macbeth was Lincoln’s favorite, too.
Though much of what we say and write and think about Abraham Lincoln today is based on guesswork and bad sources, we know that our sixteenth president was a Macbeth man beyond all doubt. In an 1863 letter to actor James Hackett,3 Lincoln wrote that “Some of Shakespeare’s plays I have never read; while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard III, Henry VIII, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful.”
Macbeth certainly kept a hold on Lincoln’s mind throughout his presidency. On April 9, 1865—five days before Booth would assassinate him at Ford’s Theatre—Lincoln was sailing back to Washington aboard the River Queen after a triumphant visit to Richmond, the recently vacated Confederate capital, and passed the time by reading out loud from a handsome quarto of Shakespeare plays.
Lincoln in February 1865. Courtesy Library of Congress.
Memoirs of the journey were later recorded by the Marquis de Chambrun and Sen. Charles Sumner, members of the traveling party. It’s difficult to read either of their accounts without getting the impression that Lincoln must have known on some subconscious level that his life was coming to an end. Even though the war was clearly coming to an end, he was overcome by melancholy and depression (perhaps owing to the fact that he’d spent much of the day visiting hospitals full of maimed soldiers), and death was certainly on his mind as he sailed along.
“Most of the (passages),” Chambrun wrote, “were from Macbeth, and, in particular, the verses which follow Duncan’s assassination … either because he was struck by the weird beauty of these verses, or from a vague presentiment coming over him.” 4
Only days after the trip, Senator Sumner would tell the same story of Lincoln reading from Macbeth in his eulogy for the slain president, and he pointed out the exact passage that seemed to inspire some “vague presentiment” in the president’s mind:
Duncan is in his grave;
after life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well
Treason has done his worst; nor steel, not poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy,
nothing can touch him further.
“Impressed by their beauty or by some presentiment unuttered,” Sumner continued, “he read them aloud a second time. As the friends who then surrounded him listened to his reading, they little thought how, in a few days, what was said of the murdered Duncan would be said of him. Nothing can touch him further.” 5
And here’s one more strange fact about the play that touched Lincoln so, and was a favorite role of Booth, Lincoln’s eventual killer: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Act 1, Scene 7 of Macbeth, contains the earliest known use of the word “assassination.”
So, what does it all mean?
Nothing, really. After all, the fact that Macbeth is the earliest printed use of the word doesn’t necessarily mean that Shakespeare invented it. Like a lot of “coined by Shakespeare” words and phrases, this is simply the earliest documented use.
Looked at from a certain angle, though, it’s easy to see psychic connections and eerie coincidences in the odd attachments Lincoln and Booth both had to Macbeth. Those given to thinking such things can surely imagine that it’s evidence of a grand design or that Lincoln’s attraction to the play, and to those lines in particular less than a week before his death, speak to a sort of latent psychic hunch about the nature of his own demise. Or perhaps even that Booth had picked up on some sort of mental energy Lincoln left behind in the Tremont House lobby.
Lincoln lore is like this in general. If you research stories of our sixteenth president and the Civil War long enough, everything seems supernatural. There’s a reason some historians quite seriously refer to Lincoln as a prophet, not a mere mortal.
And whether one believes in the paranormal or not, Lincoln has had a profound impact on the way we, as a society, think of ghosts, psychics, and communication with the dead. Perhaps only Shakespeare himself influenced our concept of the supernatural more. It may have been through no fault of Lincoln’s own (certainly his views on religious and supernatural matters are up for debate), but stories of Lincoln haunting the White House and predicting his own assassination, along with the many mysteries surrounding his life and legacy, are a part of our national folklore. By now, Lincoln almost seems like a supernatural visitor to our nation. He came from nowhere, achieved the impossible, and then was gone.
Researching him today is very much like chasing a ghost—he appears everywhere, but is impossible to quite pin down. If you follow the footnotes in the endless stream of Lincoln books, you find that even many of the most respected biographies of him make use of a lot of sources that can hardly be counted as reliable. We don’t really know what made the man tick, what his motivations were, or what all of his views might be in the twenty-first century—and we’ve never tired of trying to figure it out. He’s as mysterious as any ghost story.
It’s difficult now to determine just when Lincoln started to seem like a human being and took on the sheen of a legend; many say it started the moment he was shot, but articles about him written in the weeks beforehand, when Congress had approved the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery and General Lee had surrendered, make it seem like it was already going on by then. Scroll through some accounts of what went on at the Republican Convention of 1860, the year he was first nominated, and you’ll come away thinking that he was more legend than man even before he was president.
A century and a half later, Lincoln has been portrayed as both a deeply religious man and as a profound doubter who was not really a Christian at all; as the biggest racist on the planet, and as the best friend the black race ever had; as a hardcore abolitionist, and a man who was soft on slavery or even a slave-owner himself (a common myth that just won’t die). He’s been looked upon as both a liberal and a conservative, a socialist and a fascist, a warmonger and a wimp. Since he died before he could write memoirs and comment on his motivations and goals himself, historians have been left to fill in the blanks. Biographers were collecting anecdotes for books before his body was cold.
And when personal recollections of Lincoln ran out, his friends having died off or told all they remembered, stories of his ghost began to circulate.
It’s almost a running joke that Lincoln seems to be haunting a lot of places, as though he was the Johnny Appleseed of ghosts, leaving spirits in his wake wherever he traveled (and a few places where he didn’t). Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer once said “I’ve heard Lincoln haunts the rail lines … I’ve also heard he haunts the Lincoln room at the White House and his old house in Springfield. Now, either Lincoln is the most peripatetic ghost in the country or people think every tall ghost is Lincoln.” 6
But if we make the broad hypothetical leap and assume that ghosts and spirits are real in the first place, who says a person can only have one ghost? The idea that the things we call ghosts are someone’s immortal spirit or soul is only one of the endless theories about where the things we call ghosts come from. That a person could leave behind traces of himself that people might be able to pick up all over the place squares with several pseudoscientific theories that seek to explain the paranormal. And even if the “ghosts” people see of Lincoln are all in their head, the product of their brains processing the impact Lincoln continues to have on us, why shouldn’t that count as a ghost? Ghost hunting isn’t like Bigfoot hunting. Bigfoot either exists or he doesn’t, and that’s all there is to it. With ghosts, there’s more of a gray area. What counts as a ghost?
It’s fair to say that Lincoln haunts the United States, whether as an actual ghost, as several different ghosts, or as just a strange, unknowable presence in our collective mind and memory. His life and work changed nearly every aspect of the nation, and his death changed more of them still (his elaborate, cross-country funeral almost single-handedly created the modern funeral industry).
Mysteries about him continue to fascinate us: Was Ann Rutledge really his true love? Did he love Mary, his wife, at all? Was he a religious man? What did his voice really sound like? Is the stovepipe hat on display at the museum in Springfield really his? Did he use the term “under God” in the Gettysburg address? (It appears in some transcripts, but not in others.)
And then there are the paranormal questions: Is his ghost really haunting the White House? Did he predict his own death? Did others predict it for him? Did he get advice about freeing the slaves from mediums channeling the spirits of our founding fathers? Did his own spirit come back and speak to us through mediums later?
It’s never my intention to prove or debunk a ghost story; instead, with this book, as with most of my research into ghost lore, I simply intend to examine the backstory. I wish to determine what we really know and what we don’t about Lincoln’s connection to the supernatural (both before and after his death), and about the stories about his ghost appearing all over the country, in and out of seances.
I’ve probably just thrown cold water on a few stories about Lincoln, including one or two that have become a part of our cultural imagination.
But I think I’ve found a couple of new ones as well, and new evidence about old stories that may strengthen their credibility.
Researching this book has been equal parts frustrating and fascinating—Lincoln research always is. For every source, there’s an equal but opposite source, and scarcely any anecdote about him really holds up to intense scrutiny. Following the footnotes of a Lincoln book can drive you toward madness. But it also gives you the chance to spend days trying to determine whether Lincoln might have actually taken a ride on a flying piano, and that’s a damned interesting way to spend one’s working life.
1. Richard Sheil, The Apostate: A Tragedy in Five Acts as Performed at the Chestnut Street Theatre (Philadelphia: Nbal and Mackenzie, 1828).
2. “Theatrical,” Chicago Tribune, January 29, 1862.
3. Abraham Lincoln to James Hackett, August 17, 1863, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/P?mal:1:./temp/~ammem_uNP7
4. Adolphe de Pineton Chambrun, “Personal Recollections of Mr. Lincoln,” The Century Magazine, 1893.
5. Charles Sumner, Memoirs and Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893).
6. Karen Roach, “Lincoln Ghost Haunted Loudonville,” Schenectady Gazette, October 31, 1989.