Spirits and Abraham Lincoln: Letters to President Lincoln Concerning S

In the late nineteenth century, American spiritualists maintained that Abraham Lincoln had been a spiritualist too. Whenever they drew up lists of prominent believers, Lincoln was foremost among the reformers, judges, governors, senators, and scientists whose stature lent credence to their movement. In this paper, I look at letters written to President Lincoln by spiritualists or about spiritualism, but it is not my aim to determine whether or not Lincoln was a spiritualist. Instead, I use these letters to reflect on spiritualism as a cultural phenomena. It captured the imaginations of many Americans in the years leading up to the Civil War, drawing them to sà ©ance rooms, to mediums, or to their family parlors to commune with the dead. The letters to Lincoln reveal how spiritualism evolved from older cultural traditions and what it came to mean for spiritualists. Letters to Abraham Lincoln are available on the World Wide Web, part of the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. The Lincoln Papers include a large number of incoming letters from a variety of correspondents: friends, political figures, and regular people. Most of the letters have been transcribed and annotated by scholars at the Lincoln Study Center . Very few letters—only ten—deal with spiritualism at all. The authors, however, represent the full spectrum of letter writers, from Lincoln ’s closest friend, to a well-known New York judge, to ordinary people—that is, ordinary people who received messages from spirits. Five of these ten letters came from avowed spiritualists, four men and one woman.[1] One man denied being a spiritualist, and another sent a tongue-in-cheek introduction to two mediums, leaving his sentiment... ...ttp://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/alhome.html, accessed [30 December 2014]. [16] The relationship is described in an annotation. Joshua F. Speed to Abraham Lincoln, February 13, 1849. Transcribed and annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center , Knox College , Galesburg , Illinois . Available at Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division ( Washington , D.C. : American Memory Project, [2000-01]), http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/alhome.html, accessed [30 December 2014]. [17] Joshua F. Speed to Abraham Lincoln, October 26, 1863. Transcribed and annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center , Knox College , Galesburg , Illinois . Available at Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division ( Washington , D.C. : American Memory Project, [2000-01]), http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/alhome.html, accessed [30 December 2014].