The Apparitionists

by Peter Manseau

  Hannah, Mumler soon learned, was a medium. Not only did she claim to communicate with those who passed to the great beyond, she at times acted as a vessel for the voices of the departed. When her clients came to her with a lock of hair or a swatch of fabric and asked her to make something with which the loved one it came from might be remembered, Hannah offered far more—a direct connection, a hint of enduring love.

  Naturally, for such barrier-breaching, any medium would ask a small fee. For a slightly larger payment, she might also diagnose the illnesses of the living through the use of psychic second sight. As a “natural clairvoyant for diagnosing and treating disease,” Mumler noted, she “has been subject to this influence since her earliest recollection.” Her mother, too, had shown signs of clairvoyance, but though the condition was apparently hereditary, for her diagnostic acuity Hannah relied on another source. When asked where her expert clinical opinions had come from, she often replied, “Dr. Benjamin Rush,” the long-dead physician and Revolutionary patriot who she claimed had provided her with all the medical knowledge required.

  For all Hannah’s spiritual gifts, Mumler was most moved by “her wonderful magnetic powers.” Summoning up the aptest compliment in an age newly enamored with electricity, and the possibility that energy of all kinds might be stored and used for ever greater spiritual purposes, Mumler considered Hannah “a perfect battery.”

  “What is electricity?” he once asked. “We know it is a force; it passes silent and invisibly over the wire and performs its work; therefore we know it exists. But can this same electricity be made visible? Yes, by employing a medium, in the form of a vacuum tube, when by connecting with a battery, a stream of invisible electricity is made visible to the human eye, in its natural condition.”

  Standing at her place behind the counter of her photographic studio, a vision behind glass whenever he walked by on the packed dirt of Washington Street, Hannah was to Mumler the hidden forces of the universe suddenly made manifest. A cure at last to the existential maladies with which he had so long been afflicted.

  “I have seen men faint,” he recalled with perhaps a hint of jealousy, “under the peculiar reaction caused in their systems by imparting this wonderful, life-giving principle of animal magnetism.” For a man of scientific inclination, the popular notion that the mind could influence matter through the workings of electro-biology was perhaps the best explanation for what he had begun to feel. Speaking with greater intimacy, and possibly from personal experience, he described what it meant to be touched by someone of such obvious power. “On her placing her hands upon the head of a patient,” he said, “the subtle current is felt distinctly coursing through every tissue of the body.”

  Mumler was not a Spiritualist when he met this wonderfully magnetic medium, nor did he think it possible to communicate with the dead even when he took his first spirit photograph. Mrs. Stuart, however, was nothing if not persuasive. Being in her presence made it difficult not to believe. She had introduced him to this strange new process of writing with darkness and light, but he still had much to learn about the art that was soon to take over his life. It had been haunted long before Mumler came along.

  “Boulevard du Temple,” the first known photograph to include people. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, 1838.

  CHAPTER 2

  Love and Painting Are Quarrelsome Companions

  WHEN Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre introduced his process for fixing images on silver-plated sheets of copper in 1839, he did not believe it would ever be used for portraits. The problem was in the eyes.

  In the work of portraiture, the object looked upon by the camera—the human face—inconveniently insists on looking back. Unlike the dark pupil of a glass lens, the eye needs to blink. Exposure times for Daguerre’s images might be as long as twenty minutes. The hundreds of tiny movements a face would make during that time resulted in pictures that were blurred at best and sometimes fully unintelligible. As a medium for capturing living moments, photography’s original sin was that signs of life broke the camera’s spell.

  Daguerre discovered this himself during his earliest photographic efforts to document human activity. At eight o’clock one bright morning in 1838, he pointed his camera to the busy Boulevard du Temple in Paris. From his studio window he saw the crowded street, full as always with people and wagons going about the business of a new day. Yet despite what the artist’s eye could behold, when he examined the image he had made after an exposure of about twelve minutes, he noticed that only two figures were apparent: the dark outline of a bootblack stooped before a customer standing tall over him on a walkway that appeared otherwise empty. As Parisians rushed around them, these two were as still as the buildings and trees, and so they alone remained fixed for the future to see.

  The man who often claimed responsibility for bringing photography to the United States, Samuel Finley Breese Morse, met Daguerre in Paris shortly after each man had invented something that would change the world. The daguerreotype and the telegraph do not seem to have much in common, but in Morse’s understanding they were technologies nearly identical in their ultimate effect. Each had succeeded in erasing distance; through their application there was no chasm too vast that could not now be closed.

  Enshrined in American history as an inventor, Morse identified himself first of all as an artist. He had been born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from Boston, some forty-five years before he began tinkering with electricity and chemicals, and had supported himself as a painter from his college days. While studying philosophy at Yale, he painted miniatures on ivory for five dollars apiece and expanded his understanding of shadow, light, and perception through experiments with a camera obscura, a darkened chamber in which the image of an object is received through a pinhole and focused on a facing surface. Specializing in portraits, he continued to make his living teaching art even after he conceived of the communication system that would permanently shrink the earth.

  The son of a Calvinist minister who also wrote the nation’s first geography textbook, Morse had been concerned with the question of distance all his life. He wrote home constantly during the extensive travels of his youth, and was often vexed by the time it took to convey thoughts and feelings. “I can imagine mama wishing that she could hear of my arrival, and thinking of thousands of accidents that may have befallen me,” the young man called Finley by his family wrote from London when he was twenty years old. “I wish that in an instant I could communicate the information; but three thousand miles are not passed over in an instant and we must wait four long weeks before we can hear from each other.”

  There was at the time something of the artist’s dreamy mysticism about such a wish, but he was not at all one for the supernatural. The Reverend Dr. Jedediah Morse had raised his three boys to be thoroughly orthodox in their Christian faith, observing the Sabbath and looking askance at all competing superstitions. In the same letter, Finley described events much like those that would convulse his own country decades later when Spiritualism was born, but he apparently had little patience for spirits at the time. “There has a ghost made its appearance a few streets only from me which has alarmed the whole city,” he wrote. “It appears every night in the form of shriekings and groanings. There are crowds at the house every night, and, although they all hear the noises, none can discover from whence they come. The family have quitted the house. I suppose tis only a hoax by some rogue which will be brought out in time.”

  As he grew older, though, he learned something of the kind of loss that might make ghostly beliefs more difficult to resist.

  He was a young father and husband when he fully embraced the notion that he would paint for his living. Like artists of any age, he felt keenly the financial uncertainty of his chosen profession even as he gained some early renown, and so he had counted himself extremely fortunate in 1825 when he received a commission to paint the French hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, then in the United States to
begin a tour commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of 1776.

  Upon hearing that he had been selected from among several other prominent painters— including John Wesley Jarvis, John Vanderlyn, Charles Ingham, Samuel Waldo, and Rembrandt Peale—he wrote with great excitement to his wife that he expected to be paid “at least seven hundred dollars—probably a thousand.” There would also be an engraving made from the finished portrait, and keepsake cards printed, sales of which would net him half the profits.

  His one regret was that the work would take him from home for three weeks. The couple by then had settled in Connecticut, and Morse was to work with Lafayette in Washington. If it went as well as he thought it would, this portrait alone would allow the family to relocate to New York, where his artistic ambitions naturally led. “The only thing I fear,” he said, “is that it is going to deprive me of my dear Lucretia.”

  Lucretia Morse was then a twenty-five-year-old dark-haired beauty, and the thirty-four-year-old Finley loved her with an intensity that he at times found frightening. Given the importance of light to an artist, it probably came as no surprise to those who knew him that he would fall for a girl said to “spread perpetual sunshine around every circle in which she moved.”

  “Love and painting are quarrelsome companions,” Morse had claimed prior to meeting her. “The house of my heart is too small for both of them.” But upon encountering Lucretia, the oldest daughter of a wealthy New Hampshire family, he apparently built an addition.

  “The more I know of her the more amiable she appears,” he told his parents early in their courtship. “She is very beautiful and yet no coquetry; she is modest, quite to diffidence, and yet frank and open-hearted.” As he had previously fallen in and out of infatuations in a “harum-scarum” way, he feared his parents might object. This time, however, he assured them that he was approaching his newfound inclinations as a serious matter.

  His parents were encouraging but understandably concerned with the speed with which this had all happened. The girl was young, after all, and they had known each other barely a month. “I wish to see the young lady who has captivated you so much,” his mother said. “I hope she loves religion, and that, if you and she form a connection for life, some five or six years hence, you may go hand in hand to that better world where they neither marry nor are given in marriage.”

  They were married in September of 1818, having waited two years rather than the five or six Mrs. Morse had suggested. Lucretia was by then nineteen; she gave birth to a baby girl the following year, and a boy soon after. The years of their marriage were often financially strained, but Finley’s artistic abilities flourished with her as his muse. That his passion for her did not wane can be seen in his brushstrokes. When he painted Lucretia and their two children in 1822, he captured a shine in her dark hair and rosy cheeks, and a glow seemed to emanate from her pale skin, blending with the sunlight that filtered through a cloud behind her.

  Another son, Charles, arrived in January 1825, just days before Morse left to meet with Lafayette. It was to be the beginning of a prosperous new chapter in their lives.

  Arriving in Washington on February 8, 1825, he planned on staying until the marquis departed on the twenty-third. That would leave just enough time, he hoped, to make a study of his subject’s facial features, planning to use the resulting small sketches and rough paintings for a more formal full-length portrait when he returned to his New Haven studio.

  As it happened, Morse had arrived in the capital at an exciting time. John Quincy Adams had just been elected the nation’s sixth president. There had been no clear winner in the previous year’s popular vote, nor in the Electoral College, and so after a tumultuous few months of politicking by the front-runners, the House of Representatives put a second Adams in the White House.

  With an important portrait to paint and the political landscape shifting under his feet, Morse was kept busy. He met the current and future presidents, passed an evening with the writer James Fenimore Cooper, who then was well known for his recent novel The Pioneers, the first of his Leatherstocking Tales, and of course began his work with Lafayette, though not without some frustration. “He is so harassed by visitors and has so many letters to write,” Morse noted, “that I find it exceedingly difficult to do the subject justice.”

  Yet for all this excitement, Lucretia was never far from his mind. He wrote to her as soon as he arrived, and continued to send notes, sometimes more than once a day, as on February 9:

  My Dearest Wife,

  The great contest is over, John Quincy Adams is the President of the United States, just elected on the first ballot this day. Expresses have gone off in every direction and I suppose you may have heard the intelligence before this reaches you, but as there is a moment before the mail closes, I thought I would let you know it as soon as the mail went. I was not present myself as I had an engagement with Gen. LaFayette; I have thus far succeeded to my mind; will write again soon. Love to all the children.

  In the greatest haste but with ardent affection as ever,

  your loving husband,

  Finley

  The next day he was able to again secure some of Lafayette’s time, and made careful observations of the face he would need to know intimately if he was to do his job well. “There never was a more perfect example of accordance between face and character,” he said of the marquis. “He has all that noble firmness and consistency, for which he has been so distinguished, strongly indicated in his whole face.” As the general’s son was traveling with him, Morse soon made the acquaintance of Georges Washington de Lafayette, a man about ten years his senior. “This is Mr. Morse, the painter, the son of the geographer,” the general told his son. “He has come to Washington to take the topography of my face.” The obvious affection the elder Lafayette felt for him was yet another indication to Morse not only that he was “blest,” but that the struggling part of his life was coming to an end.

  Then a letter arrived from his father, four days after it had been sent.

  February 8th, 1825

  My affectionately beloved Son,

  Mysterious are the ways of Providence. My heart is in pain and deeply sorrowful while I announce to you the sudden and unexpected death of your dear and deservedly loved wife. Her disease proved to be an affection of the heart—incurable, had it been known.

  She was up about five o’clock yesterday p.m. to have her bed made as usual; was unusually cheerful and social; spoke of the pleasure of being with her dear husband in New York ere long; stepped into bed herself, fell back with a momentary struggle on her pillow, her eyes were immediately fixed, the paleness of death over-spread her countenance, and in five minutes more, without the slightest motion, her mortal life terminated.

  It happened that just at this moment I was entering her chamber door with Charles in my arms, to pay her my usual visit and to pray with her. The nurse met me affrighted, calling for help.

  Your mother, the family, our neighbors, full of the tenderest sympathy and kindness, and the doctors thronged the house in a few minutes. Everything was done that could be done to save her life, but her appointed time had come, and no earthly power or skill could stay the hand of death.

  It was the Lord who gave her to you, the chiefest of all your earthly blessings, and it is He that has taken her away, and may you be enabled, my son, from the heart to say: “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

  Morse left Washington immediately. The study of Lafayette he had undertaken went unfinished, its brushstrokes ending abruptly with a corner of the canvas left unpainted.

  He, too, was undone. Just days before, he had written to Lucretia in excitement about all they had to look forward to. He had detailed the bons mots he had exchanged with politicians and celebrities, described the meals he had eaten. He now realized that when he had last written to her, she was already dead.

  What had it meant that he had thought he was communicating with her? Had she not been fully alive in his mind as he scratched his
“ardent affection” across the page? “The confusion and derangement consequent on such an afflicting bereavement as I have suffered,” he wrote, “have rendered it necessary for me to devote the first moments of composure to looking about me, and to collecting and arranging the fragments of the ruin which has spread such desolation over all my earthly prospects.”

  His “derangement” was no exaggeration. It was surely a kind of insanity to talk with such passion to someone who did not exist, to believe without question in her enduring presence. There could be no denying that she lingered in his thoughts as real as she had ever been. “Oh! What a blow!” he wrote. “I dare not yet give myself up to the full survey of its desolating effects. Every day brings to my mind a thousand new and fond connections with dear Lucretia, all now ruptured. I feel a dreadful void, a heart-sickness, which time does not seem to heal but rather to aggravate.”

  Two things haunted him. First, the days it took for him to hear the news—days when his wife lay dying, when his father carried their infant son to her bedside only to watch her fade away, when her body was lowered into the grave. Being there might not have prevented any of it. If the doctors were correct, her death was foretold by a defect in her heart that had been waiting to make itself known since it was formed in the womb. But hearing of it instantly would have made a great difference, at least to his own grief.

  There was also the finality with which her face had simply vanished from his life.

  “I am ready almost to give up,” he wrote his parents two months later. “The thought of seeing my dear Lucretia and returning home to her served always to give me fresh courage and spirits whenever I felt worn down by the labors of the day. Now I hardly know what to substitute in her place.”