In December 1863, Mary’s half-sister Emilie Helm visited the White House under a safe-conduct pass from the president; “just arrived from Secessia,” as Hay tartly put it. Her visit was controversial. She was a Southerner and a member of a family that supplied soldiers to the Confederate army. Emilie’s late husband was a Confederate general, no less: Benjamin Hardin Helm, killed at the Battle of Chickamauga. Nevertheless, the president went to some trouble—and risked scandal—to bring her to the White House.1
Emilie did not like what she was seeing in her older sister. Mary’s smiles “seemed forced,” and Emilie caught what she took to be an odd, bright glint in Mary’s eyes. She talked to the president about the matter. “Her nerves have gone to pieces,” Lincoln wearily said. “She cannot hide from me that the strain she has been under is too much.” He urged Emilie to stay the summer with them in the Soldiers’ Home. “You and Mary love each other,” he said. “It is good for her to have you with her.”
Later that evening, Mary knocked on Emilie’s bedroom door. When she opened it, Emilie noticed that even though her sister’s face glistened with tears, she was smiling. “I want to tell you, Emilie, that one may not be wholly without comfort when our loved ones leave us. . . . If Willie did not come to comfort me I would still be drowned in tears. . . . He lives, Emilie!” Emilie stared in shock at Mary, whose voice assumed a tone that, Emilie said, “I can never forget.” Mary then described how her dead son came to visit her every night. He “stands at the foot of my bed with the same sweet, adorable smile he has always had,” she said, and “he does not always come alone; little Eddie is sometimes with him.” Emilie was alarmed. Mary was acting “unnatural and abnormal,” she observed; “it frightens me.”2
Mary was not the only one who seemed haunted by Willie’s memory. “Do you ever find yourself talking with the dead?” Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, Salmon Chase, recalled the president asking him. “I do. Ever since Willie’s death I catch myself involuntarily talking to him as if he were with me—and I feel that he is!” Artist Francis Carpenter, who became acquainted with Lincoln while commissioned to do a painting of the president and his cabinet, recalled that one day in 1864, Lincoln called a staff officer into the room where he had been reading alone and quoted aloud a passage from Hamlet referring to the loss of a child. “Did you ever dream of a lost friend, and feel that you were holding sweet communion with that friend, and yet have a sad consciousness that it was not a reality?” he asked the man. “Just so I dream of my boy Willie.”3
Two years after Willie died, the White House stables caught fire. The president saw the flames from the White House and sprinted out the door in a frenzied dash that shocked everyone present. “When he reached the boxwood hedge that served as an enclosure to the stables he sprang over it like a deer,” recalled an army officer who witnessed the scene, “. . . and with his own hands burst open the stable door. A glance within showed that the whole interior of the stable was in flames, and that the rescue of the horses was impossible. Notwithstanding this, he would apparently have rushed in had not those standing around caught and restrained him.” Led back to the White House, Lincoln wandered into the East Room and watched the fire from a window. “He was weeping,” remembered the officer. Tad was also present; he saw the officer’s perplexed look and explained that “the stable contained a pony that belonged to [Willie]. The thought of his dead child had come to his mind as soon as he learned the stables were on fire, and he had rushed out to try to save the pony from the flames.”4
As deeply wounded as Abraham and Mary were by Willie’s passing, none of this was particularly unusual. Even Lincoln’s intimation that he continued to commune with Willie’s spirit was not so odd. Christians in the Civil War era fervently believed in an afterlife; they felt their deceased loved ones had gone on to a better place, where they would not only reunite with each other after death but also provide a spiritual bridge between the living and God. People sometimes spoke of death as a “veil,” a thin border through which the shapes of the dead’s spirits could be discerned by the living.
The war also provided an incessant, thrumming background noise the Lincolns could not escape. When Willie died, many thousands of Americans—not just soldiers but also refugee civilians and others swept up in the war’s wake, including other children—were languishing and dying as well. The war had become an impossibly big, grinding, growling thing that filled the Lincolns’ lives from horizon to horizon—and death was its defining feature. Their loss of Willie was a personal piece of what had become the new American normal. “We presume that Mrs. Lincoln will now be able to sympathize as she could not do so before, with the thousands of mothers throughout the land who were mourning the sudden bereavement of a son,” thought one grim observer.5
In April, the nurse detailed by Dorothea Dix to attend to Tad during his illness, a young woman named Rebecca Pomeroy, received a letter, bound neatly in a white ribbon, from Reverend John Pierpont of Boston, who called on her in Washington and, knowing her acquaintance with the Lincolns, asked that the letter be delivered to the First Lady. The letter was purported to be from a spiritual medium, who had supposedly received it from the dead Willie Lincoln’s ghost. Writing to his mother, Willie’s ghost sought to assure Mary that “he is happy, and wants her to feel him as always around her; but she heeds him not, and when she is so tired in heart, closing the eyes of those dear ones committed to her care, he wishes to try to commune with her, and try to ease her mind and make her happy.” Pomeroy was not convinced of the letter’s authenticity, even as Reverend Pierpont—who apparently was—pressed her to get Willie’s communique to his bereaved mother. When she firmly refused to do so, Pierpont stormed angrily away.6
Spiritualists like the anonymous author of this letter were a fact of life for the Lincolns from the war’s outset, offering the president unsolicited advice, predictions, and opinions. A man named J. S. Hastings, “an undoubting believer in Spiritual communion,” wrote Lincoln in August 1861 that a medium of his acquaintance had accurately foreseen the Union army’s calamity at First Bull Run. On other occasions, Spiritualists wrote long, curious missives with no apparent point. “I wish you to weigh these things and see if there is not an equal balance the Devil has taught man that their neighbors was doing forever wrong and he was himself doing right and this comparatively speaking is the great cause of disharmony over the earth sphere the Devil has controlled affairs long enough,” read a rambling and punctuation-free communique from “God,” dictated through a medium named Lydia Smith, who insisted the president meet with her at “the Fitzgeralds” in Washington, D.C., where she would reveal “just what to do that will terminate this Devilish war.”7
Most of the Spiritualists operating in mid-nineteenth America were preoccupied not so much with fortune-telling or channeling God’s will as with contacting the dead. In December 1861, Lincoln received a letter from the dead ghost of Edward Baker via a New York Spiritualist named I. B. Conklin. “You will no doubt be surprised to receive this from me,” said Baker’s ghost, “but, I like millions of other disembodied spirits feel a desire to convey expressions of gratitude and hope to earthly friends. I am not dead. I still live, a conscious individual, with hope, aspirations and interest; for the Union [is] still alive.” Baker’s ghost actually did not have much in the way of otherworldly wisdom to impart to his friend, except the bland observation that “Man lives on Earth, to live elsewhere, and that elsewhere is ever present.”8
Lincoln probably did not find Mr. Conklin’s letter helpful or amusing, the wound of his friend’s death still being fresh. Three years later, he received another letter from Baker’s ghost, this time via another New Yorker named R. A. Beck. Baker’s ghost was here more exact in his advice, informing the president that God was on his side, that the Union “armies are loyal [and] you have no traitor at their head,” and that “this national conflict [will] end in a tryumphant victory.” The ghost then insisted that out of gratitude for having communicated with him from the afterlife, the president must answer two earlier letters sent to him by Beck.9
Lincoln could not have been surprised by any of this, for Spiritualism had been an increasingly popular pastime among Americans since the 1840s. Antebellum Spiritualists such as Andrew Jackson Davis, Cora L. V. Scott, and Kate and Margaret Fox believed they could achieve contact with the souls of the dead, either words and conversations with the deceased or “rappings,” loud, sometimes coded knocks on tables, walls, and floors—presumably by ghosts who could find no more direct way to converse. Exactly how people could go about contacting the dead varied from one Spiritualist to the next. Sometimes it involved mesmerism, named after its inventor, an eighteenth-century German doctor and scientist named Franz Mesmer, a trancelike state of hypnosis during which the dead spirit temporarily inhabited the body of the person who was thus entranced. Others used a séance, French for “a sitting,” in which practitioners were seated in a circle, often holding hands, and recited an incantation to summon ghostly spirits. Still other Spiritualists used artwork, claiming that their renderings were created by some unseen ghostly will guiding their pen or paint brush.
There were endless variations, tailored to a given Spiritualist’s particular set of beliefs and idiosyncrasies. Spiritualism was a widespread phenomenon during the antebellum era, especially among middle-class white Americans, but the war sent Spiritualism to greater heights of popularity. Spiritualist tracts, pamphlets, and newsletters and works of fiction dealing with Spiritualist themes were in high demand as the war progressed and the casualty lists lengthened. It was an impulse exacerbated by the fact that for a great many American families, the fate of their loved ones was never known. Most Civil War soldiers did not carry dog tags or any other identification of the sort that could survive a battle. Often their parents, wives, and other relatives and friends discovered their fate only when the letters stopped arriving; small wonder, then, that their grief drove them into the arms of Spiritualists who claimed they could establish some form of contact with their deceased soldiers.10
But for all its popularity, Spiritualism was controversial. While its roots lay in the evangelical fervor of the “Burnt-Over District” in upstate New York, it was frowned upon by many clergy: Henry Ward Beecher, for example, was so disturbed by rumors of his Spiritualist tendencies that he circulated in 1856 a strongly worded letter stating that he was a “stout unbeliever” in mediums, séances, and other Spiritualist practices. Other critics wrote books or toured the country denouncing Spiritualism’s tenets. “Spiritualism has become a gigantic evil,” declared Reverend Hugh A. Brown during a typical anti-Spiritualist lecture in Rockford, Illinois, in 1854. “It is most pernicious and soul ruining in its teachings.”11
Some people equated Spiritualism with a species of witchcraft; others saw it as mere hucksterism dressed up as theology. It was also associated with the more radical reaches of nineteenth-century American politics. Spiritualist practices were egalitarian where gender was concerned; women and men were equally capable of contacting the ghosts of the dead, many Spiritualists taught, and this led to charges that their gatherings were immoral, “free love bagnios” on a par with Unitarianism and other suspect factions. Others lumped Spiritualism indiscriminately (and without much logic) with commitments to labor and racial equality: “Millerism, Spiritualism, Freeloveism, and lastly the horrid disease of Niggerism,” according to one pungent indictment. Another story held that groups of Spiritualists in Boston “sit in circles perfectly undisguised with clothing, that is to say in puris naturalibus—men and women indiscriminately.”12
Lincoln was not the sort who indulged in serious thinking about those very matters that so preoccupied the Spiritualists. “By reason of his practical turn of mind Mr. Lincoln never speculated any more in the scientific and philosophical than he did in the financial world,” noted law partner William Herndon. Billy could not seem to get his friend engaged in conversations about metaphysics and the like, which “he brushed aside as trash—mere scientific absurdities.”13
Events related to Spiritualism occurred in Lincoln’s Springfield, but they were about equally pro and con. Merchants in town advertised the sale of Spiritualist tracts, but they also sold books debunking Spiritualist ideas and beliefs. In 1858, a woman named Emma Hardinge delivered a series of lectures on Spiritualism’s past and future in downtown Springfield, not far from Lincoln’s law office. But Springfield also hosted Spiritualism’s critics: a man named Leo Miller, for example, who in March that same year launched a hard-hitting attack on Spiritualism in the town’s concert hall “without gloves,” according to one account, in which he “clearly show[ed] Spiritualism to be an arrant delusion.”14
After the war, a Springfield man named J. Ridgely Martin, who claimed to have been Lincoln’s neighbor and to have studied law in the same building where Lincoln’s law office was located, wrote that Lincoln habitually attended séances conducted by a medium named Thorp, whom Lincoln used to try to contact the dead spirits of his mother and Ann Rutledge. It is impossible to ascertain whether Martin’s account is true.15 In any event, there were serious political risks involved for Lincoln, the always ambitious antebellum politician, to be seen in the company of mediums or other Spiritualists. He avoided association with the radical politics commonly associated, fairly or not, with Spiritualism. He also labored under the rumor that he was a religious infidel, and while many Christians saw no contradiction between mainstream Christian orthodoxy and Spiritualism, plenty of others did. The same Abraham Lincoln who had to go out of his way during the election of 1846 to announce he was no “scoffer at” organized Christian religious principles was not the sort who wanted to revisit that particular scandal by being seen in attendance at a local séance or Spiritualist lecture.
Once in Washington, he was surrounded by Spiritualists of various stripes. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and his wife, Mary, consulted a medium in an attempt to contact their own dead children, and various military men and government officials close to the president dabbled in Spiritualism. The city as a whole hosted a vigorous Spiritualist scene that predated the war; an 1852 visitor to the capital noted that “frequent meetings or circles were held at different places [in Washington], for the purpose of investigating the different phenomena classed under the head of spiritual manifestations.”16
There were rumors afoot among the Spiritualists that the president was quietly one of their own. A tale made the rounds in the early days of his presidency that while en route to Washington for the inauguration, Lincoln secretly called on a well-known New York medium looking for “spiritual association with the patriots of the past.” Newspapers around the country printed rumors to the effect that Lincoln dabbled in Spiritualist beliefs, and in 1864, the National Spiritualist Convention, meeting in Chicago, endorsed his reelection bid, albeit for the decidedly temporal reason that they saw him as a champion of “liberty over tyranny.” “Current report has it that President Lincoln is a firm and enthusiastic believer in modern spiritualism, and that regular meetings are held at the White House,” read a typical newspaper declaration, but no one could offer any real evidence to substantiate these rumors.17
In October 1863, Lincoln received a letter from Joshua Speed, an old friend from his Springfield days, who provided an introduction for a Mrs. Cosby and her companion, a Spiritualist named Nettie Colburn. “They are both mediums and believers in the spirits,” Speed wrote, “and are I am quite sure very choice spirits themselves.” Speed’s letter had a snickering undertone—“it will I am sure be some relief from the tedious round of office seekers to see two such agreeable ladies”—and just how seriously Lincoln took his friend, from whom he had drifted apart over the years, or indeed how serious Speed was himself, is difficult to ascertain.18
But even if Lincoln had been disposed to meet with such people, he had to have realized he would be playing with political fire. “Is President Lincoln a Victim of Spiritualism?” inquired a headline in the virulently anti-Lincoln New York World in May 1863. The article claimed (with no evidence) that famous Radical Republicans Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner were Spiritualists who prevailed on the will of a weak president to do their bidding because Lincoln “is a very firm believer in ghosts.” The World did give Lincoln some benefit of the doubt by suggesting that when told by Spiritualists of the political will of the dead, “he frequently remarks that the communications from the other world are often delusive.”19
Many Americans ascribed Spiritualism and séances to darker impulses than radical politics. It would not have taken much to connect the president with literal devilry, had it become known that he met with mediums or took their beliefs seriously. One anti-administration critic did just that, producing a nasty little booklet in 1863 called Interior Causes of the War: The Nation Demonized, and Its President a Spirit-Rapper, in which the author, under the pseudonym “A Citizen of Ohio,” claimed that the president was “not only a spiritualist of the Abolition school, but has his media around him, and is and has been, from the beginning of his term, directing the war under the direction of spirit rappings.” Several anti-administration newspapers hawked the book, one observing that “it contains, in a small space, many plain political truths, adapted to the times, and is forcibly written.”20
That endorsement by the Spiritualist Convention may have made Lincoln wince in a save-me-from-my-friends way. “It is well known that the infidels, atheists, free-thinkers, free-lovers, Spiritualists and ‘progressive Christians’ have always been ardent admirers of Mr. Lincoln and his policy,” noted a hostile Philadelphia newspaper, “and no one will be surprised to hear that [the Spiritualists] have now publicly ratified [Lincoln’s nomination].”21
One of the women Speed mentioned in his letter, Nettie Colburn, later claimed to have staged a séance in the White House that Lincoln attended. Ms. Colburn was an earnest sort; she possessed absolute faith in her special powers as a channel for the ghosts of the dead, who would periodically inhabit her body and cause her to speak with their voices while in a trance. She was the source of many of the claims regarding Lincoln’s supposed predisposition toward Spiritualism.
According to Colburn, she met the president in the White House sometime in late 1862. She had been making inquiries among various Washington officials in an attempt to obtain a furlough for her soldier brother, who was ill, and wanted badly to meet the president, both to help her brother and apparently also to provide Lincoln with advice from the spirit world. She knew she would be successful in the endeavor because a “little messenger of [her] spirit circle” whom Colburn referred to as “Pinkie,” assured her this would be so.
Having gained entrance to the White House, she claimed to have met the president in the Red Room, accompanied by several other friends and sympathizers, one of whom was suddenly seized by the “master hand” of a dead spirit and began to bang away at a nearby piano with such authority and force that “the heavy end of the piano began rising and falling in perfect time to the music.” Lincoln, she recalled, came down the staircase to the room with his steps keeping perfect time to the music’s tempo. “So this is our ‘little Nettie,’ is it, that we’ve heard so much about?” the president remarked when he met her.
From there, Colburn’s account becomes even more bizarre. While speaking to the president, she fell into a trance for over an hour, channeling “some strong masculine spirit force,” in which she told Lincoln in stentorian tones that he must not renege on his promise to issue an Emancipation Proclamation a few days hence. When she finally awoke, the president was “sitting back in his chair, with his arms folded upon his breast, looking intently at [her].” One of the onlookers pointed to a nearby portrait of Daniel Webster and suggested to the president that it was Webster’s ghost, his “masculine spirit,” who had spoken through Colburn. Lincoln seemed to agree. “Yes, and it is very singular, very!” he replied. He then told Nettie, “My child, you possess a very singular gift” and opined that hers was surely a “gift from God.”22
If Colburn made such a deep impression on the president at this encounter, which she claims occurred in December 1862, it is curious that she appeared ten months later in a letter of introduction from Joshua Speed as if she were a complete stranger.23 In any event, no reliable corroborating evidence exists for Colburn’s account; we have only her word and the contents of her 1891 book, Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist?, which she could manipulate to suit her purposes. As a Spiritualist and a medium, she had an obvious vested interest in making her claims. Enlisting Lincoln as a fellow traveler could only bolster her personal career and the cause of Spiritualism generally. While Speed’s letter indicates that Lincoln at least vaguely knew her name, there is no hard evidence that he ever actually met her, that she impressed him with her “gift from God,” or that she tried on his behalf to contact the spirits of the dead.24
Another widely circulated story appeared in various newspapers during the spring of 1863, describing a “spiritual soiree” in the White House, attended by a Spiritualist lawyer, judge, and author named John W. Edmonds; Abraham and Mary; Secretary of War Edwin Stanton; Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles; and several others. According to the story, written by a correspondent for the Boston Gazette, the medium in question, one Charles Shockle, induced invisible “manifestations” to pinch Stanton’s ears and twitch Welles’s beard. He then conjured the ghost of Henry Knox, who, after consulting with the ghosts of Napoleon, Lafayette, Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and the British abolitionist William Wilberforce, proceeded to give the president a great deal of unsolicited advice regarding the war. This was accompanied by various rappings on the walls, dimmed lights, and a rattling of the portrait of Henry Clay, hanging on a nearby wall. Lincoln supposedly asked the ghost of Knox, via Mr. Shockle, to ascertain the ghost of Stephen Douglas’s opinion on the war. The Douglas-Knox-Shockle apparition duly replied that Lincoln needed to attain at least two more battlefield victories, to which the president replied, “I believe that, whether it comes from spirit or human.”25
Leaving aside the manifest silliness of the story—one wonders whether the Gazette article is actually political satire—there is no reliable evidence that it occurred. In his voluminous diary, Welles made no mention of this event, and Edmonds wrote a public letter denying that he had ever met the president, save on one official occasion during which no dead spirits were consulted. When the account made its way into the papers, one anti-administration paper declared that the story “will have the effect to degrade the President, his office and his people in the eyes of the whole civilized world.” True enough, which is why it probably never happened.26
On the whole, there is no reliable evidence that Lincoln tried to contact ghosts via a séance or other Spiritualist ceremony. To believe the stories regarding Lincoln’s wartime dalliances with Spiritualism, one would need to accept that this man, who was rightly recognized as a master politician in his time, was so overcome with desire to contact the dead—suddenly finding a passion for subjects related to the afterlife he never expressed before the war—that he disregarded his own better political judgment regarding the risks associated with Spiritualism and its connection in the minds of many Americans with radical politics, and this at a time when moderate and conservative support was critical to the success of his policies. We must also accept that he would attend séances in the White House (or elsewhere) while never once mentioning the fact, or anything related to Spiritualism at all, in any extant public or private document.27
One would also need to accept at face value the claims of Spiritualists like Nettie Colburn. Possibly she was telling the truth or some version of it. But it is more likely that she and her fellow Spiritualists—a segment of Civil War–era society that was peppered with more than its fair share of people who were charlatans or delusional, or both—either greatly embellished their claims or manufactured them entirely out of whole cloth.
Lincoln’s private secretary John Nicolay had it about right when he wrote after the war that the president’s dalliances with ghosts were much exaggerated. Like many people during that time, Lincoln “might have had some curiosity as to Spiritualism,” Nicolay conceded, but “he was not superstitious, nor did he have any spiritualistic tendencies. . . . I do not remember that even curiosity ever impelled him to attend a séance. He had more important business on hand during those days.”28
For Mary, however, matters were more complicated. Willie’s death was a profoundly traumatizing event, and given Spiritualism’s popularity during the war among some of her friends, such as Mary Welles, it is not surprising that she sought help from mediums in trying to contact his dead spirit. Nettie Colburn claimed to have had close and repeated contact with the First Lady. She may or may not be reliable in this regard; again, her book is our only source for much of this information. But other sources do indicate that Mary was making the rounds of Washington’s Spiritualist community, trying to find someone who could help her contact her lost child. Orville Hickman Browning, a congressman and old friend of the Lincolns from their Springfield days, wrote in his diary on New Year’s Day 1863 that Mary told him she had visited a local medium who “had made wonderful revelations to her about her little son Willy,” though Browning did not note what those revelations entailed.29
Elizabeth Keckly also possessed some degree of interest in Spiritualism. Sometime soon after Willie’s death, Keckly discussed Spiritualism with Mary. In particular, Keckly introduced Mary to a man named Charles J. Colchester—“Lord” Colchester, as he styled himself. He claimed to be the long-lost son of an English duke and a medium capable of contacting the dead by means of inducing rappings and other noises from the nether regions.
In fact, “Lord” Colchester was a fraud, albeit of a charming and imaginative variety, who managed to ingratiate himself with quite a few important personages in Washington, including several congressmen. He was later prosecuted for illegal juggling (performing jugglery and sleight of hand required a twenty-dollar license), and during his trial he argued that he was not actually “juggling,” but rather acting while under the influence of ghosts who were moving his body without his awareness, “under the guise of spiritual control.” He lost the case.30
Mary was soon taken in by Colchester’s charm. She invited him to the Soldiers’ Home, where he contacted Willie for his mother’s benefit. In a darkened room, he performed a ceremony inducing Willie’s ghost to produce loud knocking on a table and scratches along a wall. “Mrs. Lincoln told me of these so-called manifestations,” remembered wartime correspondent Noah Brooks, who had become acquainted with the Lincolns, “and asked me to be present at the White House when Colchester would give an exhibition of his powers.”
Brooks was not impressed. Soon after Mary approached him, the reporter availed himself of the opportunity to attend one of Colchester’s sessions at another Washington home (the event cost him a dollar), where he discovered that the erstwhile Spiritualist, who claimed to have conjured knocks, bells, and drumbeats from dead spirits in another darkened room, was producing these sounds himself. Brooks got into a scuffle with Colchester—caught red-handed with the drum—during which the “Lord” made his escape. With more than his share of cheek, Colchester appeared at the White House a few days later, begging Mary for a War Department pass to New York and strongly hinting that he was willing to blackmail the First Lady by making public their connection. Frightened by the blackmail threat, Mary sent for Brooks, who confronted Colchester, called him a “scoundrel” and a “humbug,” and told him to leave Washington forthwith, which he then did.31
Lincoln was aware of his wife’s Spiritualist explorations, particularly the Colchester episode, and when he found out about the séance in the Soldiers’ Home, he reacted not as an enthusiastic Spiritualist believer, or even as a curious onlooker, but rather as a rational skeptic and a husband who feared his wife might have been the victim of a con man. He asked Joseph Henry, head of the Smithsonian Institution, to investigate Colchester. Henry did briefly speak with the man but learned nothing of note—and soon thereafter, Noah Brooks exposed the Englishman as a fake.
Colchester never did perform a séance in the White House, and there is no hard evidence that any séances were held there, once we discard the uncorroborated word of Colburn and others with a vested interest in exaggerating and fabricating their connections with the Lincolns. And there were contrary voices from people who knew Lincoln well: his friend and fellow lawyer from Springfield, Ward Hill Lamon, who sniffed that Lincoln “was no dabbler in divination—astrology, horoscopy, prophecy, ghost lore, or witcheries of any sort”; Reverend Gurley, who observed that “Mr. Lincoln was greatly annoyed by the report that that he was interested in spiritualism”; and Nicolay, who saw him on a regular basis during the war and wrote, “I never knew of his attending a séance of Spiritualists at the White House or elsewhere. . . . That he was in any sense a so-called ‘Spiritualist’ seems to me almost too absurd to need contradiction.”32
A fundamentally rational man, Lincoln was not at all given to extended explorations of the ghostly, more esoteric dimension of death. But he was steadily transitioning toward a deeper spiritual understanding, a process that did not much involve a belief in ghosts, “rappings,” or the like. And while Willie’s death no doubt played a central role in that process, the true catalyst was the battlefield.