The Apparitionists Read online

  Gardner had already begun to copyright his own images. As his personal renown as a photographer continued to grow, as it surely would, a separation from his employer ought to have come soon in any case. But this exhibit marked a turning point. A rupture.

  It was not only the fact that Gardner’s name did not hang above his own creations—that was, after all, an inevitable condition of working for another man. It was also that, as a consequence, Brady had managed to make himself synonymous with a transformation of their shared art. He was already the most famous photographer in the country. His public relations savvy and affinity for figures of popular culture had made him the image maker of choice of every celebrity of the age. Now it seemed Brady would be regarded not just as the most famous, but the most historically significant as well.

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  From these pictures the historian will gather material for his pages; for the embrasures of earthworks and the walls of fortresses will crumble and resolve themselves into dust, while the colors of their photographic counterparts will only have deepened and fastened with time. And here a wonder suggests itself, that the substance should fade and the shadow imperishably remain.

  Should the enterprise of Mr. BRADY fail to secure success amid the blare of trumpets and the beat of drums, it will surely be recognized when we shall have smoothed the wrinkles of war from our weary brows, and swept from them the crimson blossoms of battle, to bind them instead with the sweet silver lilies of peace.

  The enterprise which begets these battle pictures is worthy of support as well as praise. Appealing as they do to the popular heart, they can scarcely fail of success. In one point of view their value can scarcely be overrated. They present a panorama of the war, faithful as is everything that comes from the studio of the Sun, that impartial artist, whose only study is truth.

  Gardner could be forgiven for thinking “truth” was an odd word to apply to one man’s earning praise for another man’s efforts. He had logged more hours on the battlefield and trekked longer miles in the army’s wake than anyone, his employer included. And yet it was Brady now credited with using his camera to summon the muse of history: “Among the many sun-compellers,” it was said, “Mr. BRADY deserves honorable recognition as having been the first to make Photography the Clio of the war.”

  Brady had finally won for himself a spot in the mythology of great Americans on which he had built his career. When it came to the battlefield with which he had secured this position, however, he had not been there at all. But who could have known that from simply viewing the images now hanging on Broadway? The man who had stood among the bodies, who had focused his eye and his instruments on the dead to keep some part of them in the world of the living, Alexander Gardner, was nowhere to be seen.

  GARDNER OPENED HIS OWN studio in Washington in November 1862, while his Antietam photographs held New York in thrall. To much less fanfare, he began making and displaying images under his own name in a building at Seventh and D streets, a short walk from the red sandstone of the Smithsonian Institution. On the wooden façade of his new artistic home, he had listed the services he would offer in thick stripes of whitewash, each letter as tall as a child:

  GARDNER’S GALLERY

  Cartes de Visite, Stereographs, Album cards,

  Ambrotypes, Ivorytypes, Hallotypes

  Imperial Photographs

  He made sure to include all the popular photographic formats of the day, and naturally advertised the high-priced, large portrait style known as the Imperial, a specialty for which Brady’s establishments had become known thanks to Gardner’s expertise. In smaller letters he added the extra services provided by many photographers, such as the coloring and retouching of images that promised to make every photograph a slight improvement on reality, and the sale of photo cards depicting many of the well-known politicians and cultural luminaries who had lately made Gardner their portrait artist of choice.

  Of all the styles and subjects on offer at Gardner’s new gallery was one he chose to advertise with the largest letters on the building’s outer walls:

  VIEWS OF THE WAR

  These four words were twice the size of the others, suggesting something of the proprietor’s estimation of how popular they would be. With the war more than a year old by then and no resolution in sight, pictures of the ruined country, and ruined bodies scattered across its southern states, continued to be prized.

  In order to gain better access to such scenes, Gardner had agreed to serve as the official photographer for the Army of the Potomac. He accepted an honorary commission as a captain from General George McClellan, who put the photographer’s skills to use not only chronicling life among the infantry and the aftermath of battles, but making perfect copies of maps and other documents essential to the war effort.

  The photographs he took while trailing McClellan’s forces were some of the most memorable of the war, and never more so than when he was on hand for Lincoln’s arrival in Sharpsburg to personally dress down the general for his failure to pursue Robert E. Lee into Virginia following the Union’s slim victory at Antietam. Though it was not the intention of the pictures he made that day, Gardner inadvertently recorded the only known images of the president in mourning.

  In February of that year, Lincoln’s third son had died before his twelfth birthday. No less than the bloated bodies Gardner had photographed along the Hagerstown Pike, the boy had been a casualty of war. Just outside Washington, Union forces had for months camped beside the Potomac River, polluting the White House’s own water supply with their waste. With his oldest son, Robert, away at school, his two younger boys, Thomas and William, took ill with typhoid. Tad recovered; Willie did not.

  In the images Gardner made of Lincoln near McClellan’s headquarters—a white canvas tent held up by a wooden pole—the president wore a black mourning band on his stovepipe hat, like a ring on the finger of a nation now married to Death. Willie had become for him a personal emblem for the loss so many felt, and though he stood as straight and nearly as tall as the tent pole, Lincoln seemed physically diminished.

  If he did not blame himself directly, the press throughout the rebel states hoped to persuade him to do so. “It is not in the Southern character to rejoice in the afflictions of even a bitter and odious enemy,” the Charleston Courier wrote of Willie’s death, “but we may hope that the lesson will show the despot President in some degree the evils of war.”

  An artist who had painted Lincoln in happier times, Alban Jasper Conant (no known relation to the medium), remarked that since the boy’s death, “ever after there was a new quality in his demeanor—something approaching awe.” In 1860, the future president had posed for a portrait that the painter came to call “Smiling Lincoln,” but the smooth-faced, bemused fellow he had once been was now impossible to see in the bearded, haggard man he had become just two years later.

  It was well known how deeply the boy’s death had affected him. Only weeks before he posed for Gardner in Sharpsburg, an aide had happened upon the president perusing a volume of Shakespeare, the lesser-known work King John, in which a father speaks of the possibility of meeting his son in the afterlife. Lincoln’s thoughts on heaven veered toward the heretically skeptical, but the passage moved him nonetheless:

  . . . I have heard you say

  That we shall see and know our friends in heaven:

  If that be true, I shall see my boy again . . .

  But now will canker-sorrow eat my bud

  And chase the native beauty from his cheek

  And he will look as hollow as a ghost . . .

  And so he’ll die; and, rising so again,

  When I shall meet him in the court of heaven

  I shall not know him . . .

  “Did you ever dream of some lost friend,” Lincoln had asked his aide, “and feel that you were having a sweet communion with him, and yet have a consciousness that it was not a reality? That is the way I dream of my lost boy Willie.”

  For Mary Todd
Lincoln, the hope of such communion was not just a dream. Long curious about Spiritualism, her interest intensified after Willie’s death, sparking rumors of séances convened in the White House.

  While the Confederate newspapers danced on the boy’s grave, the northern Spiritualist press reported on the progress of his soul into the afterlife, noting the medium Fannie Conant’s claims that she had successfully channeled his ghost. As she had with so many of those who had died during the war, she fell into a trance in the Banner of Light’s offices and spoke in a voice that answered to his name. In the first lady’s estimation, this was not at all far-fetched. “Willie lives,” Mrs. Lincoln was known to say. “He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of the bed with the same sweet adorable smile he always has had.”

  She even made a clandestine pilgrimage to see the spirit photographer who was receiving so much attention. At the time she first visited Mumler, Mrs. Lincoln had also recently learned that her brother, an officer in the Confederate army, had been killed in action. She arrived at the Boston studio in disguise and left only half satisfied, carrying an image of herself seated in the foreground and an apparition said to be her fallen brother standing nearby. She no doubt hoped it would be her innocent boy rather than her traitorous sibling who appeared on the glass, but the spirit world, she knew, could no more be controlled than the world of the living. Though he might have profited from such an image, it was later said that Mumler chose not to do so, “out of regard for President Lincoln, who was at that time on the eve of a reelection to his office.”

  That his wife held such innocent belief in the possibility of bridging the chasm that had opened between parents and child became a further weight on the thoroughly pragmatic president. “Mr. Lincoln was greatly annoyed by reports that he was interested in Spiritualism,” the family’s pastor, Dr. Phineas Gurley, later recalled.

  It was not that Lincoln failed to understand the longing for connection Spiritualist beliefs offered, however. He understood it perfectly well. Something of that longing showed in his eyes as Gardner prepared one plate after another to record his image on glass.

  Mrs. H. B. Sawyer, embraced by a spirit she recognized as her late husband and holding a spirit she believed to be the child they had lost. William Mumler, 1862–1875.

  CHAPTER 15

  War Against Wrong

  WILLIAM GUAY—former photographic studio owner, former Confederate soldier, former paranormal investigator, and former aquarium manager—soon found yet another occupation: working for the Mumlers at 258 Washington Street. “Superintending improvements in the operating room,” as one reporter noted, his job of the third month of 1863 was to streamline the process required to handle the ever-growing number of requests they received.

  It was around this time that the Mumlers began advertising a more ambitious service than they had previously felt equipped to offer. When the business began, William had humbly insisted he could never be sure if a spirit image would appear; now he was so certain of his technique, he claimed his clients did not even need to visit his studio. They could simply send information about a departed loved one in the mail, along with seven dollars and fifty cents, and receive photographs of spirits in three weeks’ time. “Persons residing at any distance from Boston desirous to obtain Photographs of their departed friends by Mr. W. H. Mumler, will please send for Circular which gives all the particulars,” their regular advertisement said.

  Requests for mail-order spirit photos poured in. One received from New York was from none other than P. T. Barnum.

  As the business continued to prosper, the specter of investigation continually reappeared. A letter published in the Spiritualist press recounted how a gentleman visiting the Mumler gallery had looked with great interest at all the spirit photographs displayed, only to be surprised by the ghostly presence of his own wife, who remained resolutely of this world. Yet there she was hovering as an apparition above a tableau of living figures of no known relation. There was no mistaking it, the man said. Not only had his wife posed at this gallery before all the spirit photograph excitement began; she remembered the sitting distinctly because she had worn a hat that was “so much outre” that she had never liked the picture. Now she would be wearing it forever in someone else’s eternity. The writer of the letter addressing this outrage was not unsympathetic to Mumler’s beliefs. In fact, he shared them.

  “Being an investigator of the spirit-phenomena almost from its first rap, and becoming convinced of its truth very early in its career,” he wrote, “I was of course pleased at the new phase of spirit-photography, and hoped to find it proven.” But he also recognized that making or embracing false claims could only hurt the cause. “Facts have been, are now, and must continue to be the foundation of the great gospel of Spiritualism,” he continued. “The separation of fact from fiction has been, is now, and must also continue to be the only way to establish on an eternal basis the truth and ultimate triumph of the fact of inter-communication between the inner and outer life.”

  As quickly as the Spiritualist press had lined up to praise Mumler, it backed away, publicly retracting earlier endorsements of the man, his technique, and the supposedly objective experts whose testimonies the same papers had not only published, but commissioned. “Early in the progress of the ‘spirit photograph’ controversy, we published an endorsement of Mr. Wm. Guay, whose testimony with reference to these pictures was positive and important,” the editors of the Herald of Progress wrote. “At that time, without a long or intimate acquaintance with Mr. G., we felt satisfied of his integrity and reliability as a witness. We are now fully persuaded that our endorsement was premature, if indeed our confidence was not misplaced. Without positively affirming Mr. Guay’s deliberate untruthfulness, we do not hesitate to say that he is not strong enough to tell the same story at all times! Our published endorsement of Mr. Guay as a reliable witness on this question is therefore hereby retracted and withdrawn.”

  In the view of many, however, there still remained cause to believe. “There has as yet been no satisfactory exposé of the methods employed by Mr. Mumler in producing these pictures,” the Herald continued, “neither have we seen any entirely successful imitations by other artists.”

  The investigator most doggedly pursuing such an exposé turned out to be another artist-inventor. Like Morse, Cutting, Rehn, Serrell, and indeed Mumler himself, Charles Boyle would soon have a number of patents to his name, particularly as the inventor of a process that allowed photographic images to be printed directly on wood, which had many practical applications and was praised generally by the photographic establishment.

  After being repeatedly rebuffed by Mumler in much the same dismissive way Isaac Rehn’s request had been treated, Boyle sent a challenge to the Banner of Light offices with a request that they print it. “I propose to go to Mr. Mumler’s rooms with a committee of disinterested men and an honest reporter, and I will then and there, in the presence of that committee and reporter, discover and exhibit the trick of spiritual photographing as done by said Mumler, if he, Mumler, will grant said committee, reporter, and myself the same privileges that I have heard he has given to Mr. Guay, who has written favorably of his (Mumler’s) operations in regard to spirit photographing.”

  Mumler again refused, arguing variously that owners of studios that did more business than Boyle’s had already tested him, and so there was no need for duplicate efforts by lesser photographers, and that the spirits occasionally became so “disgusted” with the mortal need for proof that they refused to have their picture taken at all.

  “I wish it distinctly understood that I am not at war with the pure article, should it ever make its appearance,” Boyle stressed to the Spiritualists who watched this row. “I simply war against wrong. No one would rejoice with a deeper thankfulness than myself to see proved beyond peradventure that the dead live on and can return so palpably to earth, as to hold their shapes upon its science.”

  ON THE TWELFTH DAY of February, a Spi
ritualist editor, John Latham of Boston, stood in the offices of the Banner of Light and happened to see one of Mumler’s photographs displayed on a desk. The picture showed a woman from New York—Mrs. Blossom was her name—who claimed to recognize a ghostly figure in the picture as her own departed mother. Mrs. Blossom had sent this photograph along with a locket containing a smaller likeness of her mother so that the editors of the Banner might compare them. A man standing nearby spoke of these two images as the best proof yet that Mumler was legitimate. Yet Latham was not so sure; he felt certain he had seen the ghostly image before.

  Some months earlier, Latham’s friend Mr. Pollock had shown him a spirit picture taken of his wife in which a very similar sort of ghost had appeared. When the two men compared the images, they found they were right. While they sorted out how best to deal with this apparent ruse, a third friend happened along and was able to provide further information. The ghost in both images was alive and well.

  Upon visiting her house and informing her of the use to which Mumler had put her image, she was quite alarmed to discover she had somehow been drawn into such an affair. “To think that they should pretend that I am a spirit,” she huffed, “when I am still in the body!”

  She excused herself to find her photo album. A moment later she returned with an image of herself identical to the ghost Mr. Pollock now held in his hand. She then turned it over to show the stamp printed on the back: