Mary Todd Lincoln and the Photograph That Captured a President's "Ghost"
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Mary Todd Lincoln and the Photograph That Captured a President's "Ghost"
Mary Todd Lincoln's interest in Spiritualism led the widowed former first lady to the parlor of a controversial Boston "spirit photographer."
In the last photograph of her life, Mary Todd Lincoln is not alone. She sits serenely with her hands folded over each other, most of her body hidden under a black cloak, as an apparition hovers above her. The “ghost” looks just as calm, his hands resting on her shoulders in an apparent gesture of comfort. Though the outline of the tall, bearded man behind her is faint, it’s unmistakably an image of president Abraham Lincoln, who had been assassinated seven years earlier as Mary sat by his side.
When Mary Todd Lincoln sat for the photograph around 1872 in the Boston studio of controversial “spirit photographer” William Mumler, she was a woman haunted not only by her husband’s violent death, but by the deaths of three of her four sons. As the former first lady of the country, she was a high-profile client for Mumler. But she was otherwise much the same as the many others who had paid up to $10 for the coveted images, more than three times the going rate for photographs at the time, historian Peter Manseau writes in his book “The Apparitionists,” a chronicle of spirit photography. Hounded by grief, Mumler’s clientele hoped that their dead loved one would appear to his camera, offering them a sign from the afterlife that they were still with them.
Like them, Mary Todd Lincoln found what she was looking for. Though Mumler was widely suspected to be a fraud, Manseau told History.com that “no one could dissuade her that it did not mean that Abraham Lincoln was still by her side.”
A country in mourning turns to Spiritualism
While Mumler’s “spirit photography” had loud detractors, it was heralded by followers of Spiritualism, a loosely organized religious movement that swept the country in the mid-19th century. Its devotees, including Mary Todd Lincoln, believed the living could communicate with the dead. Sparked in 1848 in Hydesville, New York by the now-infamous Fox sisters, the movement was led by mediums who relayed messages from spirits about everything from assurances of their well-being in the afterlife to guidance on politics, ethics and morality.
Many prominent Spiritualist mediums were women, a position that afforded them financial independence and a voice of prominence on reform issues like women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery, writes historian Ann Braude in her book “Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America.” The rise of Spiritualism intersected with the women’s rights movement, Braude writes, launched the same year and less than 30 miles away from Hydesville in Seneca Falls, New York.
Spiritualism was believed to have more than eight million followers in the U.S. and Europe at the end of the 19th century, but the movement was also dogged by revelations of high-profile hoaxes — including an 1888 confession that revealed the Fox sisters’ supernatural abilities to be a ruse — and denunciations from mainstream religious leaders.
“Whether reverenced or ridiculed, Spiritualism was ubiquitous on the American scene at mid-century,” Braude writes. “For some it provided solace in the face of bereavement, for some entertainment, for some a livelihood earned from the credulous.”
“Whether reverenced or ridiculed, Spiritualism was ubiquitous on the American scene at mid-century,” Braude writes. “For some it provided solace in the face of bereavement, for some entertainment, for some a livelihood earned from the credulous.”
The movement gained traction during the Civil War, a conflict so deadly that it fundamentally changed Americans’ relationship with death. An estimated 620,000 people were killed in the war between 1861 and 1865, according to the National Park Service, about equal to the total of American fatalities in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, combined. Because it was so rare for the bodies of loved ones slain at war to be returned home, millions of people were forced to grieve their losses without the comfort of traditional death rituals that required the body to be present, historian and writer Kimberly Kutz Elliott tells East Wing Magazine.
Because it was so rare for the bodies of loved ones slain at war to be returned home, millions of people were forced to grieve their losses without the comfort of traditional death rituals that required the body to be present, historian and writer Kimberly Kutz Elliott tells East Wing Magazine.
“If your husband was buried on a random battlefield somewhere in Tennessee, and you lived in Boston, you might never be able to bring his body back home and have a funeral and do the things you were expected to do as a good Christian,” says Elliott, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on spirit photography and images of Abraham Lincoln’s spirit in the post-war era.
Under Spiritualism, dead loved ones could return home, even if their bodies did not, Elliott writes.
For some, Spiritualism bolstered the Christian belief of the immortality of the soul, Braude writes. But it also challenged the traditional Calvinist notion of the afterlife, Elliott says. Under Calvinism, a dead loved one’s soul would ascend to heaven and relinquish attachments to their existence on Earth — so long, of course, as they were devout Christians — as their body “slept” to await the return of Jesus. Non-Christians were cast even further afield from the land of the living, relegated to eternal damnation.
“Spiritualism was very much against that idea,” Elliott says. “Your loved ones still cared about you, they still watched over you, you could still talk to them if you needed.”
The belief was a comforting one for many, and especially for Mary Todd Lincoln, whose life was marked by a series of devastating losses. While first lady, she held as many as eight seances in the White House in an attempt to contact her dead children, writes historian Jean Harvey Baker in her book “Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography.”
As Mary Todd Lincoln once told U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner, according to Baker, “a very slight veil separates us from the loved and lost, and to me, there is comfort in the thought that though unseen by us, they are very near.”
“Through Spiritualism, Mary Lincoln lifted that veil,” Baker writes.
Spiritualism on trial
When Mary Todd Lincoln visited Mumler’s Boston parlor in 1872, the photographer’s reputation was in tatters. His rise to fame had begun a decade earlier, when he said he stumbled upon a ghostly image in a self-portrait he took while testing his camera equipment. After a popular Spiritualist newspaper reported on the “girl made of light” in the photograph, demand for “spirit photographs” skyrocketed, Manseau writes. But skeptics were quick to question his work. One visitor to his studio claimed an “apparition” in one of the spirit photographs was his wife, according to Manseau — a woman who was very much alive and remembered sitting with Mumler for a portrait.
In 1869, Mumler was put on trial for fraud in New York City, where he had briefly moved his business. The trial turned into a national spectacle, grabbing headlines and attracting vocal supporters and detractors of Spiritualism. Circus tycoon P.T. Barnum, who Manseau writes “hated all swindles except those he created and controlled,” went so far as to commission a photograph of himself with Abraham Lincoln to prove how Mumler’s images could be faked. But with no direct evidence incriminating Mumler, he was eventually cleared.
At the trial, Mumler claimed he had no knowledge of how the spirits appeared to his camera.
“The accused does not know, and has never pretended to know, by what power or process, other than that of producing an ordinary photograph, these spirit photographs are produced,” his attorney said at trial, according to Manseau.
For Spiritualists, it seemed as if their entire religion was on trial, Elliott says. They were inclined to believe that the camera — a technology still in its infancy — could see what the human eye could not.
“Spiritualists were saying, ‘This is entirely possible and what we believe, and just because you can’t figure out how it’s happening doesn’t mean it’s not happening’,” Elliott says.
Mary Todd Lincoln was almost certainly of the same mind.
A first lady lifts the veil
It was the death of Mary Todd Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie in February 1862 that led her to practice Spiritualism in earnest, Baker writes. Before that, according to Baker, she had many Spiritualist friends and was familiar with the popular movement. The death of Willie, who succumbed to typhoid fever during Abraham Lincoln’s term in the White House, left the first lady inconsolable. Willie was known to be the favorite of her four sons, one of which, Eddie, had died at the age of 3 more than a decade earlier. After Willie died, Baker writes that her dressmaker and confidante Elizabeth Keckley described the first lady’s “paroxysms of grief” as “the wails of a broken heart, the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions.”
Mary Todd Lincoln was raised in the Presbyterian church, which expected grieving women to take comfort in God and accept death as his divine will, Baker writes. The church preached that “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” and comforted mourners by assuring them that their loved one was better off in heaven. Women, in particular, were expected not to show too much emotion after the death of a loved one, lest they appear to flout the will of God. But Mary Todd Lincoln could never come to terms with Wille’s death in these terms, Baker writes.
Five months after his death, Baker writes, Mary Todd Lincoln wondered “if our heavenly father has forsaken us in removing so lovely a boy from us. Yet I know a great sin is committed when we feel thus.”
It was Keckley, a Spiritualist herself, who suggested the first lady seek out a medium, Baker writes. That spring, Mary Todd Lincoln visited the well-known mediums the Lauries at their Georgetown parlor, according to Baker. There, Baker writes, another medium, Nettie Colburn, “darkened the parlor and arranged her patrons in a circle with their hands on a table so that they could communicate with those invisible beings that ‘surround us like a great cloud.’”
In the years that followed, the first lady consulted frequently with the Lauries, Colburn and a host of other mediums, even inviting them to the White House for seances in the Red Room. Many claimed to be able to connect with Willie’s spirit — something Mary Todd Lincoln herself later said she learned to do on her own.
“Willie lives,” Mary Todd Lincoln once told her half sister, Baker writes. “He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of the bed with the same sweet adorable smile he has always had. He does not always come alone. Little Eddie is sometimes with him.”
Mary Todd Lincoln’s Spiritualist beliefs were among the many criticisms that contributed to lasting damage to her reputation, Baker writes. A woman in many ways ahead of her time, according to Baker, her interest in politics and establishing herself as a first lady in American culture caused her to be considered an “unruly woman.” In particular, the historical characterization that she was “crazy” continues to persist, in part because she was involuntarily incarcerated in a mental health institution later in life at the behest of her only surviving son, Robert. Baker, however, concludes that characterization to be unfair.
“To be sure, Mary Todd Lincoln was the victim of a miserable fate beyond her control that destroyed what she most cared about as a conventional nineteenth-century woman: her family,” Baker writes.
“To be sure, Mary Todd Lincoln was the victim of a miserable fate beyond her control that destroyed what she most cared about as a conventional nineteenth-century woman: her family,” Baker writes.
Mary Todd Lincoln’s practice of Spiritualism helped her reconstitute the family that she loved so dearly, Baker writes. In so doing, she stepped outside the boundaries society placed on women in mourning. She refused to forget Willie, as the church would have her do, and instead sought to bring him back to life.
The camera “resurrects” a fallen president
Mumler’s famous “spirit photograph” was the last image taken of Mary Todd Lincoln, who died a decade later. When she sat for the photograph, a widow in her 50s, she was undoubtedly relying on her Spiritualist beliefs to resurrect her slain husband, in much the same way she had with her son.
Though modern scholars agree Mumler faked the photograph, it nonetheless had wider implications at the time for a traumatized nation, Elliott says. Like other images of Lincoln’s “ghost” published after his death, he is pictured in a scene of serenity and homecoming. In Mumler’s spirit photograph, he is shown reunited with his wife, appearing to be continually watching over her. For a citizenry still in shock from his violent death — the first time an American president was assassinated — some believed the image showed that Lincoln was still watching over them, too.
For Mary Todd Lincoln, it was yet another way to find solace in lifting the “veil” between the living and the dead.
“To some, the photograph… is evidence of either her gullibility or her madness,” Manseau writes. “To others, it suggests not just the psychological damage done to one woman, but the suffering of the nation that she represents in her grief. To her, it was simply the kind of comfort that made all other meanings irrelevant.”