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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781601630704 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 03/10/2009 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 2.60(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Out of the Wilderness
He spoke with a voice of thunder, he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses. The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen ... His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America.
— A Muslim chief in a remote corner of the Caucasus, as told to Tolstoy
Prescience seems to run in families; not necessarily as an inherited trait, but through constant exposure to a certain perceptibility or predisposition that shapes and molds the young mind.
Back in old Kentucky, a pioneer, still unmarried, was having a recurrent dream: He followed a wayside path to a strange house, saw its chairs, table, fireside, where a woman was seated, and he saw perfectly her face, eyes, and lips. She was paring an apple. This woman would be his wife. The dream came again and again, haunting him, until he followed the path to the house, and there saw the woman, sitting at the fireside paring an apple; her face, eyes, and lips were as he had so often seen in his dream. Tom Lincoln later told this dream to his son, Abe, and the boy searched his own dreams, especially the recurrent ones, for meaning.
"Visions," an older Abe Lincoln would say, "are not uncommon to me. Nor were they uncommon to that blessed mother of mine. ... She often spoke of things that would happen [and] even foretold her early death ... just when she would die. ..."
Born on a Sunday, the same day as Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809), Tom and Nancy Lincoln's son was long-limbed, Buddha-eared, grey-green-eyed, and had an indescribable brick-dust coloring alternately called saffron brown, or, according to a South Carolinian, "the dirtiest complexion." It was a "doughnut complexion," as Walt Whitman once said. His shoulders were angular and drooping, a metaphor of what would become the proverbial brooding, melancholic Lincoln. He was flat-footed, and his gait had a peculiar swing, according to his cousin Dennis Hanks. And in after years, Abe would hardly outgrow his awkwardness, derided by some — right through his presidency — as uncouth and vulgar. A Springfield lawyer, whose office Lincoln would sometimes frequent to borrow law books, thought him the most uncouth-looking young man he had ever seen. Later, a visitor to Lincoln's White House, who did not succeed in getting her petition satisfied, complained afterward that his stocking was limp and pale, and his old coat could pass as a pen wiper. Another visitor found him in a loose dressing gown and carpet slippers. His tie listed to one side of his collar, his old gray shawl was shabby. His clothes hung on him so unkemptly, Carl Sandburg would later comment that they must have been put on when he was thinking about something else. During the War, an Army doctor once told Lincoln that he resembled a Virginia wood-chopper. Others jibed that the president changed his socks once every 10 days, and brushed his hair sometimes. Even Nettie Colburn Maynard, who knew the president and would become a lifelong admirer, had to admit that he impressed her as being indifferent to his apparel, his clothing at times being "decidedly seedy-looking."
Eccentric and incongruous, Abraham Lincoln was "a curious compound of genius and simplicity"; stern, yet tender; melancholy, yet playful; "there is moral law, yet there is also compassion." "Steel and velvet," he was known for both gentleness and prowess, and for his swings from garrulous to solemn; for his defense of the underdog, but also biting, sarcastic humor ("skewering his adversary") reserved for his rivals. Nonetheless. ...
Although many characterizations of the Railsplitter President depict him as undemonstrative — at times aloof — the impression is easily offset by countless recollections of his tenderness and compassion. He suffered as a young boy when his father slaughtered his pet pig, to whom he had been devoted. He refused to join his schoolmates in torturing a mud-turtle, and afterward wrote a paper arguing against cruelty to animals. His first turkey shoot, at age 8, was also his last: Thomas Lincoln was not home when Abraham spotted some wild turkeys not far from their cabin. His mother gave him permission to use his father's rifle, so he shot and killed one of the big birds, and after that, he never felt inclined to pull the trigger again. A mile from the cabin was a salt lick for deer; he could have easily done the shooting, but no; his father did the shooting.
The story is oddly reminiscent of an old Caintuck (Kentucky) tale that talks about one Mr. Featherton's "enchanted rifle" called Brown Bess. This fire-iron was the marvel of the Caintuck forest, where Lincoln was born, 'til one day a thin, gray old man — a mysterious stranger — blew upon the rifle, Brown Bess, and forbade Mr. Featherton to use it to shoot a deer. And lo, the streams flowed backward and the shadows pointed the wrong way, and the deer in the brush sped off unharmed (similar to the ghost of Virginia Dare — invulnerable, a silver-white doe that moves fleetingly on moonless nights through the forests of Roanoke Island). Well, anyway, that was the last they saw of that old gray man of melancholy visage. Brown Bess now had become useless, until a famous Indian doctor told Mr. Featherton how to break the charm.
Later, Abraham Lincoln's son, named Thomas after Abraham's father (but called Tad), would save the life of a turkey slated for a White House Christmas feast. The 10-year-old was beside himself when the time came to slaughter the feathered biped named Jack. Taddie burst into a Cabinet meeting and pled for the life of his friend the turkey, which he personally fed and had trained to follow him around. Sobbing uncontrollably (he took after his mother), the boy begged his father, deploring the planned execution as wicked. The boy sobbed that his pet was a good turkey, and he didn't want him to be killed. At length, the indulgent father granted a reprieve.
It is curious that Mary Todd Lincoln, Tad's mother, would boast, as a young girl, that when she grew up she would become the wife of a president. Her grandmother once chided her for being noisy and asked, "What on earth do you suppose will become of you if you go on this way?" Mary replied, "Oh, I will be the wife of a president some day." In her early years, Mary often contended that she was destined to be the wife of some future president.
Abraham had a similar inkling: "... riding over the prairie of Illinois with him long years ago ... [Ward Hill] Lamon, 'was told by him repeatedly that he did not recollect the time when he did not believe that he would at some day be President.'"
In his teens, his father would hire him out to the Crawfords for farmwork. One day while busy at his labor, Mrs. Crawford asked, "What's going to become of you, Abe?" He answered, "Me? I'm going to be president of the United States."
Later, the young man's bravado would be echoed by a neighbor, Mr. Offut, whom Lincoln vigorously helped build a new store made of logs (the same store in front of which the famous wrestling match with Armstrong — good name for a wrestler — would take place). When Offut's supplies arrived, Lincoln stacked shelves and corners with all manner of goods, working so industriously that Offut declared: "He knows more than any man in the United States. ... Someday he will be president. ... He can outrun, outlift, outwrestle, and throw down any man in Sangamon County." Lincoln was 25 years old.
Earlier, around the time Abraham Lincoln reached his majority, there began in America a sweeping groundswell of religious bodies and experimental sects, many with a distinctly Utopian or socialist flavor. There were Quakers and Shakers, Dunkers and Moravians, Brook Farmers and Adventists, Rappites and Perfectionists, Fourierists and Mormons, Universalists, Methodist and Baptist revivals, Millenialists, Hopedale and Nashoba, Bethel and Aurora, Amana and Zoar. The Amanas were "spiritual adventurers," 800 German Pietists, who settled in Iowa on 25,000 lush acres, establishing seven villages upon the communal pattern. Bleib treu was their motto: Stay true. Zoar Village was also settled by German separatists and pacifists on the Tuscarawas in Ohio, their society also "communistic." As for the "northwest" (today's Midwest), another communitarian group was founded by Robert Owen, "the Father of English Socialism," who came down the Ohio and settled on the Wabash. His place, called New Harmony, helped give the territory, Lincoln's turf, a name for visionary and egalitarian schemes, a renaissance that in the 1830s and 1840s was animated by the hope of applying public lands to social amelioration.
Robert Owen's ox teams and pack horses came through Lincoln's Gentryville, Indiana, carrying people on their way to this new place on the Wabash River. After leaving Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln had been raised on Pigeon Creek, near Gentryville, which was less than 50 miles from New Harmony in Posey County. Owen's son, Robert Dale Owen, was 25 years old when he and his father sailed to America and went out West for their social experiment (which would fail within three years). Abraham and Robert Dale met on the Wabash at the port of New Harmony; Abe was ferrying a boat on the Ohio River, taking a flatbed down the Ohio and Mississippi, peddling cargoes to planters.
Owen Sr., a Welshman, was a man of wealth and distinction; he had made a speech before Congress explaining the vision of New Harmony — no fighting, cheating, or exploitation, and equal sharing. As Carl Sandburg recounts the impressive migration, ox wagons and pack horses kept coming past the Gentryville crossroads, the scheme lighting up Abe Lincoln's heart. And all those books! The schooling cost about $100 a year, and Abe could have worked for his board. But Tom Lincoln had other plans for his son. He sneered at his son's legemania and lust for "eddication," hid his books, and even threw some of them away. Abraham was virtually in bondage to his father who preferred to hire him out for wages. But the son deplored the tedium of farm work, and had other plans than delving, grubbing, and shucking corn.
Lincoln's melancholy would later be attributed in part to "his father's cold and inhuman treatment of him." Both parents, in fact, punished their son corporally. There is some speculation that Lincoln inherited his mother's sadness and sensitivity, and his father's moods, "strange spells," and fits of solitude. But Abraham was unstoppable: "Good boys who to their books apply / Will all be great men by and by," he once wrote. He called himself "a learner," and others agreed that he could pump a man dry on any subject he was interested in.
And he remained a learner. Wined and dined during his long ride to Washington as president-elect in 1861, Lincoln was served oysters on the half-shell (probably for the first time). He took it in stride, good-naturedly learning the art of oyster-eating. And he would never stop learning. In January 1865, he told Judge Davis that he had just learned the correct spelling of m-a-i-n-t-e-n-an-c-e, which he carefully spelled out for his old crony in the middle of a long and arduous White House handshaking ordeal. Even Horace Greeley would dub President Lincoln "a growing man."
When Robert Owen's votaries came down the Ohio in 1825 and 1826, it was called the "boatload of knowledge." Though Lincoln was eight years younger than Robert Dale Owen (1801–1875) and the two came from opposite ends of the social spectrum (Owen Sr. was a rich industrialist and philanthropist who had paid $132,000 for the new lands), the young men were surprisingly alike, sharing deep convictions about slavery (Indiana was a budding nest of UGRR — Underground Railroad stations), the working man's rights, free thought, and moral philosophy. Owen, as was Lincoln, was rather the odd-man-out, ridiculed by others, and generous in a way that attracts jealous censure. Most of all, the two young men shared political ambition. By 1843, Owen would be a member of Congress, after serving illustriously in the Indiana legislature. While in Congress, he introduced the bill organizing the Smithsonian Institution; he became one of its regents in 1846 and chairman of its Building Committee. Owen excelled in everything he did, and once earned the sobriquet of "Privy Councillor of America."
It was in the following decade, in 1854, that Owen Sr., now in his 83rd year, embraced Spiritualism after sitting with Mrs. Hayden, the first American medium to visit and impress England. Veteran socialist, famous on both sides of the Atlantic, Owen Sr. had been a materialist and atheist throughout his career, his publication Regional Quarterly Review promoting his innovative social and humanitarian views. Owen, however, was acquainted with Frederick W. Evans, who would become the Shaker Elder, himself converted to Spiritualism after the extraordinary manifestations at the Shaker village in Lebanon, New York, starting in 1837. While in his native England, Evans had been a believer in Robert Owen's social theories; after coming to America, he searched for a place to start an "Owenite" commune in New York, and there, came upon the Shakers. Robert Owen, for his part, admired the Shaker scheme, regarding it as an example and precursor of modern communitarianism. And when the Shaker manifestations began, Evans invited Owen to witness these phenomena from the spirit world. He did visit, after which a long correspondence ensued.
For the next 17 years, Robert Owen thought about what he had seen at Mt. Lebanon, where the Shakers had, even before the Fox sisters, inaugurated the new era of modern Spiritualism. The incomparable Nandor Fodor observes:
It is curious to note that Andrew Jackson Davis, who saw him [Owen Sr.] when lecturing in America in 1846, should have written in November, 1847, some months before the advent of the Rochester knockings [Fox Sisters], that according to a message which he received from the spiritual spheres, Robert Owen was destined to hold 'open intercourse' with the higher world.
[In his] Review, [Owen] published a formal profession of his new faith and of the grounds on which it rested. In the same year he issued ... a manifesto, The Future of the Human Race; or Great, Glorious and Peaceful Revolution, to be Effected Through the Agency of Departed Spirits of Good and Superior Men and Women.
The debunker squad, always on the prowl, managed to disparage Owen's brand of Spiritualism: "He was only interested in communicating with spirits who supported his ideas for the general improvement of society, such as Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin ... Shelley, Channing, and the Duke of Kent, who had been a great patron of his.
True, his own son, Robert Dale, was also a critic, who heard of his father's conversion "with pain and regret." He probably thought the old man was losing it. But new surprises were in store for the too-brilliant Owen the younger. For in 1854 he would be appointed American Charge d'Affairs in Naples, Italy, and there his colleague, the Brazilian minister, introduced him to mesmerism, apparitions, poltergeists, and other manifestations. Owen began to study these things and decided that what was needed was scientific research. "We cannot hush it up. ... Viewed in its scientific aspect," he concluded, "we might as well interdict the study of electricity."
In the autumn of 1855, D.D. Home, the Scots-born medium, frail and consumptive though a striking-looking man, left England for Florence, Italy, to visit the Trollopes, and hopefully recover in the fair clime of sunny Italy. While there, he was introduced to the king of Naples, and the king's brother presented him with a ruby ring shaped like a horseshoe. Crowned heads were requesting séances with Home on every hand. And now, Robert Dale Owen had contact with "D.D." during his stay in Naples. "[It] started him on a career of psychic investigation. He vowed not to rest until he proved survival a certainty or delusion. He found overwhelming evidence in favour of survival [of the spirit]."
Robert Dale Owen, the materialist who had risen to eminence in New York's Hall of Science in the 1830s, was now engaged in an entirely new inquiry, which challenged his cultivated intellect. Daniel Dunglas ("D.D.") Home, though still quite young (born in 1833), was fast becoming the world's most famous physical medium. Best remembered for his spontaneous levitations, he produced in fact every known phenomena, save apports: Tables moved, accordians played by themselves, phantom hands appeared, veridical messages from departed friends were communicated; there were raps and noises and the shaking of buildings, and there were Home's extraordinary "fire-test" and the inexplicable elongations of his body during psychic demonstrations.
Through the Home sittings in Italy, Robert Dale Owen seems to have become acquainted with Elizabeth Barrett Browing, the poet, whose circle (which she called "visionary friends") welcomed Home with open arms. Owen also met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, in Italy; later, they would sit together with the Fox sisters: In the late 1860s, they were "frequent visitors of Kate's ... receiving countless pages [automatic script] from Kate's hand. ..." Elizabeth's correspondence with Harriet showed a shared interest in matters spiritual. Elizabeth wrote to "Hattie": "I don't know how people can keep up their prejudice against spiritualism with tears in their eyes. ... My tendency is to break up against it like a crying child."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Psychic Life of Abraham Lincoln"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Susan B. Martinez, Ph.D..
Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword 15
Prologue 19
Introduction 25
Chapter 1 Out of the Wilderness 35
Chapter 2 "What Next?" 81
Chapter 3 The Trimmer 133
Chapter 4 "O, Why Should the Spirit of Mortal Be Proud?" 175
Chapter 5 "This War Is Killing Me" 195
Chapter 6 Man of Destiny 221
Notes 261
Bibliography 275
Index 281
About the Author 287
What People are Saying About This
In this informative and intriguing book, Dr. Susan Martinez digs deeply into the documented records of Lincoln's involvement with mediums, and sets forth a preponderance of evidence suggesting he was indeed guided by benevolent spirits in his most crucial decisions. --Michael E Tymn, vice president, Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, and author of The Articulate Dead
Dr. Martinez presents compelling evidence that one of America's greatest and most beloved presidents had been deeply involved in Spiritualism. She deserves the appreciation not only of Lincoln scholars and admirers, but of those who are attempting to enrich and deepen their own spiritual quest.
--Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., author and current Alan Watts Professor of Psychology, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center