The Apparitionists Read online

  One evening after she had fallen into a trance, she called out in the voice of one of the Union dead.

  “Captain?”

  “Sir,” she replied in Gibbs’s voice.

  “I was here a little while ago. My name was Philip Guinon. Do you remember me?”

  “I do.”

  “I was killed at Fair Oaks,” she said. Also known as the Battle of Seven Pines, fought in Henrico County, Virginia, on June 1, 1862, it was a day with eleven thousand casualties, nearly equally split between North and South.

  “I got the privilege of coming here a few minutes this afternoon to thank those kind friends who went to see my wife and children,” the medium continued in the dead soldier’s voice. “Bless ’em! If only they knew how—I said I’d keep calm so I will—but if they only knew how much good it did me, as well as my wife and children, they’d be glad they went. I thank ’em. It’s all I can do, now, Captain, but I’ll pay ’em by-and-by.”

  FOR BOSTON’S SPIRITUALISTS, the war’s righteousness was a matter of faith supported not by scripture but by the voices of spirits who told them the struggle must continue. In the Banner of Light séance room, questions of why the war must be fought, or how long it would go on, were less important than what the conflict might signal in the unfolding relationship between the living and the dead. Though Fannie Conant spoke in the voices of those killed on both sides, there was little doubt which side she believed had the favor of the world to come.

  In the case of William Mumler, however, readers of the paper’s Message Department found that the woman speaking for the dead did not want to be pinned down on matters as quick to change as technology. Where spirit photographs were concerned, her ghostly friends insisted, it was too soon to tell.

  “There is much that is genuine true, beyond the possibility of doubt, surrounding this recent unfoldment of spirit-power,” the spirits said through the medium. “There is also much that is untrue, and which has its origin not in the world spiritual, but in the world material. The false or untrue was never born of Nature; on the contrary, it originates in what we call art.” They continued, “It is not only your duty but your right, as rational and intelligent beings, to study this new spiritual unfoldment closely, and to draw the line of demarcation between the two.”

  “This is your work, and not ours,” the spirits said. “Inasmuch as you have the faculty to divide the right from the wrong, the false from the genuine, it is your duty to exercise it, and to weigh the balances of your own judgement all that is presented you from the spirit-world, or from the world in which you now live.”

  When the séance ended, Fannie Conant fell silent, as if exhausted from the effort of viewing mortal quandaries from someplace far above.

  WHILE MUMLER’S PHOTOGRAPHS were so preoccupying Boston, Fannie Conant had other reasons to feel spiritually exhausted. News from the front came that Lieutenant William Berry was dead. Killed along with seven thousand others at the Battle of Antietam, he had apparently not been protected by spirits that day. But the overall loss of life proved to be a boon for Spiritualism itself. So many corpses lying in farmers’ fields drew journalists like flies, soon followed by photographers, whose images would make death a fitting subject of polite conversation as never before.

  As much as those in attendance at the Banner of Light’s circle may have been pleased by this in theory, the reality of the end of Berry’s corporeal life came as a shock. As it was later reported by the Message Department, it took his spirit nearly a month to travel from Maryland to Massachusetts. “On the evening of October 11, the spirit of Wm. Berry,” the column noted, “gained partial control of the medium, and attempted to make himself recognized.”

  On that night, Fannie moved her hand as if it held a pen, miming writing to give some impression of who the spirit now controlling her might be. When no one present could identify him, he left the circle. If any feared they had heard the last of him, they did not have long to wait.

  “The next evening, October 12, he came again, going through the same motions, but I was still at a loss to identify,” Berry’s former partner Luther Colby wrote.

  Again the spirit moving the woman at the front of the séance hall said very little, but managed to announce that Berry had recently been killed in battle.

  “At this point,” Colby continued, “I was strongly impressed with the presence of Brother Berry and when I pronounced the name, he shook my head violently, in token of glad recognition. Although the notice of his death had just appeared in the Banner, I was the only one in the room that had seen it.”

  Fannie Conant continued to move as if she were momentarily possessed by the spirit of her lost collaborator, the man who had recognized her gifts and helped her reach the wider world. She managed to speak only a few words.

  “To the friends of the Banner,” Colby wrote, “he wished me to say his past experiences had elevated him to the place of greater usefulness in the future, where he was content to dwell.”

  Confederate dead after the Battle of Antietam. Alexander Gardner, 1862.

  CHAPTER 12

  A Big Head Full of Ideas

  FROM HIS POSITION on the north bank of the sunken roadway, Alexander Gardner could see no fewer than sixteen bodies. This one with legs bent at the knees like he was riding a bicycle; that one with his hand resting gently on a comrade’s thigh. They clogged the bottom of this deep wagon gully cut between farmers’ fields like logs floating down a river. Anonymous all, nearly every man had his features hidden by earth, a flap of coarse wool, or the shielding limbs of other bodies. Only one faced upward and unobscured. He stared into sunshine that made this a good day for photography, his dry mouth open like an aperture taking in the vast September sky.

  Gardner pointed his camera down into the ditch, positioning it so the dead men appeared upside down on the ground-glass focus screen. He adjusted his view until all four corners of the image contained only unremarkable details, the better to frame the remarkable horror at the center.

  In the finished photograph, the lower right would show the bloody dirt upon which the closest body seemed to be crawling. At the lower left, a ravaged hillside. The upper corners were filled with empty air, beneath which a scorched cornfield would give the photograph a swatch of necessary darkness, allowing the lighter shades to stand out in stark contrast. Traversing the picture’s focal point, a stripe of commingled corpses and debris would stretch to the left edge and beyond, as if to eternity.

  The two men now watching Gardner work from across this dark chasm would inevitably appear blurred, but this would likely not read as a failure on the artist’s part. In their abstraction they could be anyone, allowing the viewer to imagine standing and gawking just so. They would also provide two strong verticals to offset the photograph’s multiple horizons, the layered lines of grass, corn, sky, and death. Important to balance the elements of such an unpleasant landscape—the eye wants symmetry, especially when faced with a mangled moment like this.

  Satisfied with the tableau he had composed, Gardner moved to his wagon to prepare a plate. He had been trained as a portrait photographer, and perhaps would never shake the instinct to tell his subjects to remain still. Nonetheless, he knew he could take his time. He and his colleague James Gibson were the only photographers on the job, and the Union burial crews saw to their own first. To capture an image of these Confederate dead where they fell was in some ways easier than it was to pose a society matron in a Washington studio. Only the late-afternoon sun, slanting dramatically on the gray uniforms, reminded him he did not have all the time in the world.

  In the darkness of his wagon, Gardner balanced a rectangle of glass on his fingertips, poured the collodion, and blew it dry. Ten by fourteen inches; it was a challenge for any novice to coat such a large plate just so—absolutely vital not to roll the pool of sticky liquid over itself—but Gardner was no novice. The precise tilt and rock of the wrist required was second nature to him, remembered by his muscles as reliably as any oth
er man might move a pen to write his name.

  Once the plate was prepared, he placed it inside a lightproof box and carried it carefully back to the camera. The focus window pulled forward to receive it and snapped back in place with a spring-loaded grip. Gardner then opened the aperture and began to count.

  One. Two. Three. Four . . .

  Had any of the dead men suddenly awoken, they might have thought Christmas had come early. Despite his dark hair, Gardner was the very image of a young Saint Nicholas. Not only did the Scotsman have a Viking’s brawn, he also had a jovial air fully out of place with the surroundings. Once told he looked the part of a half-wild mountain man, he playfully obliged by dressing in fringed leather and a beaver fur hat for a self-portrait. In person, his brogue would have given the illusion away, but in the photograph he could have been born and raised on the frontier. Who was to say what illusions the photographs he now was making would maintain?

  Five. Six. Seven. Eight . . .

  Exposures in the field could take up to half a minute. With every second, the outlines of the bodies appeared more solidly on the glass. Soon they would be carted away, rolled into shallow graves. By the time grass grew above them, the best of Gardner’s images might be reproduced as engravings in the press or sold for a dollar apiece. Some might call the war photographer’s work ghoulish, but it was through his efforts alone that these few fallen did not merely disappear.

  GARDNER HAD COME TO America looking for utopia; he found battlefields instead. Though he was physically imposing and clearly built for the latter—in his friend Walt Whitman’s estimation, he was “large,” “strong,” and “mighty,” and possessed a “splendid neck”—Gardner was temperamentally far more suited for the former, and had spent the better part of his life searching for it. Whitman further said that the photographer was “a man with a big head full of ideas.” He had meant it as a compliment, perhaps not knowing that it was a characteristic that had proven dangerous.

  By his fortieth year, Gardner had lost several members of his family to his ideas—specifically, to a plan launched with the best of intentions that had gone disastrously awry. This same plan would eventually lead him to the heart of a war for the future of a nation not his own.

  Gardner was born in the town of Paisley in the Scottish Lowlands, to a family, one biographer would note, that had given many ministers to the local kirk. He entered not the ministry but the workforce, and he did so early, as nearly all children of his social station did at the time. In the particulars of his employment, however, he had been luckier than most. As a teenager in the 1830s, he had apprenticed as a silversmith—a good fit for a young man with artistic leanings and a precise, scientific mind. By then relocated to Glasgow, in his off hours he took classes in botany, chemistry, and astronomy, alive to the details and variations in the world around him.

  In a city then entering the industrial age, he was also aware that the new world being created behind factory walls was not always so lovely. A social reformer of the day lamented, “I have seen human degradation in some of the worst places both in England and abroad, but I did not believe until the wynds of Glasgow, that so large an amount of filth, crime, misery, and disease existed on any one spot in any civilized country.” The “wynds” were alleyways creating a maze-like warren surrounding the city’s tenements. They were often too narrow for a cart to pass through, and so those living along them survived on what little could be carried in by hand.

  “In the lower lodging houses,” the reformer continued, “ten, twelve, sometimes twenty persons, of both sexes, and all ages, sleep promiscuously on the floor, in different degrees of nakedness. These places are generally, as regards dirt, damp, and decay, such as no person of common humanity . . . would stable his horse in . . . No efficient aid can be afforded them under existing institutions, and hundreds in a year become inured to crime, and pass through the rapid career of prostitution, drunkenness, and disease, to an early grave.”

  In the 1830s, successive outbreaks of typhus and cholera took thousands of lives a year, including Gardner’s father. A teenager at the time, young Alexander looked for other paternal figures and soon found one in the Welsh reformer Robert Owen, who was then making waves across Britain with his advocacy for the downtrodden and his open endorsement of a revolution to overturn the existing social order.

  Shortly before Gardner’s birth, Owen had made the then radical suggestion that “no Male or Female shall be employed in any such Mill, Manufactory, or Building, until he or she shall have attained the age of Ten years.” For those over ten but not yet adults, he proposed that they should not be permitted to work more than twelve and a half hours a day.

  Reasonable though such recommendations now seem, Owen’s ideas were at the time brushed aside. “The employments of these Children in Cotton Mills,” one critic argued, “is not sedentary. It is neither laborious, nor such as tends to cramp their limbs, to distort their bodies, or to injure their health.”

  Like other radicals of the day, Owen soon lost hope in the possibility of changing society as a whole other than slowly, and by example. He established factory communities designed around the revolutionary concept of regarding the lives of workers and their families with something other than the bottom line in mind.

  Gardner grew up hearing of the reforming communities Owen established, not only in Scotland, England, and Ireland, but in the United States, where Owen purchased thirty thousand acres on which to begin a fully self-sustaining utopian community. Ultimately it proved as successful as most other utopian experiments, and he lost nearly all his fortune as a result of its failure.

  Following in the reformer’s footsteps when he was not yet thirty years old, Gardner persuaded a cohort of acquaintances to pool their resources and make a new life in America, with the goal of establishing “by means of the united capital and industry of its partners, a comfortable home for themselves and families where they may follow a more simple, useful and rational mode of life than is found practicable in the complex and competitive state of society from which they are anxious to retire.”

  They settled on Iowa, and the first to go were Gardner’s brother James, several in-laws, and a handful of family friends, who together made up an enterprise they called the Clydesdale Joint Stock Agricultural and Commercial Company. Alexander planned to join them a few years later. Until then he would serve as adviser and administrator of the expedition while raising funds and gathering other interested parties in Scotland. Though ostensibly the expedition’s leader, he would never see most of them again.

  GARDNER HAD ARRIVED AT Antietam earlier that day, September 19, 1862. Two mornings before, Union general Joseph Hooker gave orders to fire on Stonewall Jackson’s forces as they moved through a cornfield north of Sharpsburg, Maryland. The shooting was so intense, Hooker later said, that “every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife.” With dawn breaking on a clear day, the Confederates fell blind in a storm of corn and fire, then died in rows as neat as the stalks had been. An hour later, the newly reinforced rebel army rallied and the fighting continued, much of it centered on the sunken roadway later called Bloody Lane and the whitewashed pacifist meetinghouse known as the Dunker Church.

  The wagon carrying Gardner’s gear rolled into view of the battle-scarred chapel at the same hour of the worst fighting two days before. The Dunkers—so called for their preference for full-immersion baptism—were a peaceful people and would be horrified to see their humble house of worship become an icon of such a deadly battle. Its plain walls were pockmarked now; inside, its sanctuary was filled with the wounded, too unstable to be carried away.

  Sharpsburg was a day’s ride from Washington, where Gardner had for years been the manager of Mathew Brady’s thriving photographic studio on Pennsylvania Avenue. With Brady still living in New York, Gardner was an equal partner in all but name, recognition, and profit—though he had done a great deal to expand the busines
s. At the end of the 1850s, when the craze for owning two-by-four-inch portraits known as cartes de visite was about to sweep the nation, it was Gardner who had acquired the four-lens camera that made reproducing such images cheap and easy.

  Brady had his own knack for recognizing business opportunities, of course. It was he who had sought the federal government’s permission to follow along on the army’s Potomac campaign. He had gone uninvited to view the battle at Bull Run—“like the war horse,” it was later said, Brady “sniffs the battle from afar”—and had dreamed up the rolling darkrooms that were so strange-looking they had come to be called “whatsit wagons.” Recognizing that the war would spread quickly in many directions, he had hired the best photographers available to follow the army’s movements. Not just Gardner but James Gibson, George Barnard, and Gardner’s frequent collaborator Timothy O’Sullivan were dispatched with an eye toward bringing back as many battlefield images as could be captured. Whatever came of the war, Brady suspected, providing pictures of its prosecution could be lucrative.

  Without a doubt, Gardner owed his ongoing employment as a photographer to his employer’s genius. Yet still it rankled. When generals and politicos paraded through the gallery eager for images that might be reproduced as engravings in the press, it was Gardner who arranged the backdrop behind them. It was Gardner who posed them beneath the ceiling windows in a sturdy wooden chair. And it was Gardner who captured and finished the images—every one of which was stamped Portrait by Brady.