The Apparitionists

by Peter Manseau

  “Whether considered in regard to the honesty with which it was given, or as the embodiment of facts that the prosecution has failed to controvert, the testimony of the defense calls for the acquittal of the prisoner.

  “Now let us look at this countervailing evidence. It is proved that shadowy, ghost-like pictures can be produced by other photographers. Everybody acquainted with photography knows that to be so; it has never been denied by us.

  “The experts who gave evidence for the prosecution followed the beaten track in which they had trod for so many years. Science has taught them certain facts, and they are unwilling that anyone should declare anything not fully within their comprehension. They don’t believe that science can improve. Men like these would have hanged Galileo, had he lived in their day.

  “If the spiritual belief is true, then we must admit that there is nothing in Mumler’s works to justify the charge brought against him. Spiritualists found their belief on the Bible. If we believe in the Bible, we cannot fail to believe that spirits do appear, at times, and are palpable to the sight of those mortals gifted with the power of seeing them.

  “As far as I’ve seen,” Townsend said, “I never knew a class of people to lead more upright lives, or die happier deaths than professed Spiritualists. Spiritualism came in time to fill a gap in the religious world. People were drifting rapidly toward total neglect or unbelief when Spiritualism appeared and woke them up to the importance of the great hereafter. It was required by the necessities of the times, and if it convinced only one single person of the immortality of the soul it has served a good purpose.

  “It is spreading everywhere,” Townsend added in closing. “All the Barnums in existence are unable to destroy the faith of those who believe in and adhere to it.”

  AS TOWNSEND TOOK HIS place again beside Mumler at the defense table, Elbridge Gerry prepared himself to speak.

  “May it please the court,” the prosecutor began. “I have listened with great pleasure to the remarks of the learned counsel for the defense. If legal acuteness and professional ability alone would suffice to extricate this client from the consequences of his crime, they certainly have not been spared in the presentment of his cause. But while I am compelled to admire the subtlety of the argument, I shall endeavor to expose its fallacies.

  “This is no private prosecution. One of the gentlemen connected with a public journal of this city—well called the World, from the universality of its topics—had his attention called to these so-called spirit photographs. Satisfied that a huge swindle was being perpetrated, he brought the matter to the attention of the chief magistrate of this city, who at once directed his right-hand man, his Chief Marshal, Mr. Tooker, to investigate it personally. And he did so. I insist therefore that any assertion that private malice instigated these charges is wholly without foundation.

  “The prisoner at the bar, William H. Mumler, stands charged by the People with the commission of three distinct offenses; two of the grade of felony, and one of misdemeanor. First: Upon the complaint of Joseph H. Tooker, with having in the month of March 1869, designedly and by false pretenses defrauded and cheated him out of, and obtained from him, the sum of ten dollars, lawful money of the United States of America. Second: Upon further complaint of Joseph H. Tooker, with a concurrent complaint of P. V. Hickey, with having designedly, and with intent to defraud, obtained from said Tooker the sum of ten dollars, by means of gross frauds and cheats which were practiced by the prisoner habitually upon the public for the purpose of obtaining, and with the result of obtaining, sums of money from many credulous persons; and that the prisoner was therefore indictable as a cheat at common law, within the meaning of the statute. Third: Upon the complaint of Joseph H. Tooker, with concurrent complaints of P. V. Hickey, with stealing, taking, and carrying away by trick or device the sum aforesaid from Tooker, and other similar sums from other persons. This brings within the statute of larceny.

  “The prisoner took the remarkable position—always a last resort in a desperate case—that the charges made against him were ostensibly true, that he did obtain money from these so-called spirit photographs, but that they were not the result of mechanics, artifices, or other means. Admitting the pretenses, admitting the receipt of money upon the credit of these pretenses, and admitting that the pretenses were made for the purpose of obtaining the money, he traversed the falsity of the pretenses. In other words, he asserts that these so-called spirit forms are produced by means wholly beyond his control, for which he cannot account, and that those means are unknown, and not human. And then, by way of logical sequence, he insists—as his learned counsel has insisted in his argument—that he is not to be punished, because he has not used deceit, or mechanism, or sleight of hand, to produce these so-called spirit pictures.

  “Now, the law does not deal with the supernatural,” Gerry continued. “Nor recognize it as an element in its dealing with facts. It never attributes to unusual causes results which may be accounted for by the employment of ordinary means to produce them. And hence, when, as here, an averment is made of the existence of things, knowledge of which cannot be had by means of the exercise of the physical senses, the party making the averment must prove it as made. The onus, in other words, rests on him who asserts that unnatural means did produce a natural result.

  “Our law interferes with and constrains no man in the exercise of his religious belief. But it does restrain men of every opinion and creed from acts which interfere with Christian worship or which tend to revile religion and bring it into contempt. The law places the Bible in the hands of every convict in our state prisons, and it punished the use of profane or blasphemous language as a misdemeanor. And the law does not recognize any individual belief as an excuse for infringing its provisions made for the safety of the whole community. It does not exempt the Mormon who chooses to marry two wives in this state from punishment for bigamy because he is a Mormon. Nor on the other hand, if any persons believing in human sacrifices as part of their religion should attempt to sacrifice human life in that way, would they be excluded from punishment for murder upon the ground that their religious belief justified or required the act.

  “When therefore, as here, a man is shown to have obtained the money or property of others by means which the law proscribes as criminal, it does not permit him to plead as an excuse his religious views or belief, except so far as such a plea amounts to that of insanity.

  “I do not assail nor ridicule the belief of any that the spirits of the departed still hover around the living. But when, as here, it is gravely asserted as an existing fact that such spirits do manifest themselves visibly and audibly to the living, I insist that something more than visions seen and voices heard by only single individuals at a time must be proven to show that such visions and voices are not what medical science has demonstrated them to be, the phantasms of daydreams—the rooted fancy of mind diseased.

  “There is no proof of any spiritual agency, only evidence that certain persons believe it exists. Man is naturally superstitious, and in all ages of the world, impostors and cheats have taken advantage of credulity to impose on their fellows less sharp than themselves.

  “A word in conclusion,” Gerry said. “This case is simply one of many where an adroit criminal is attempting to evade the hand of justice, and to practice, untrammeled by fear of human consequences, a most wicked fraud as his livelihood. The law is not only for the protection of the strong and the prudent. It grants no license to the cunning man to deceive the simple by artifices, which he proportions to the mental strength of those with whom he had to deal just as the poisoner proportions his drugs to the bodily strength of his victims.

  “The Chief Magistrate of this city, with an energy that does him honor, has determined to put a stop, if possible, to these wholesale swindles. The arm of the law should be liberally extended to aid him in his efforts. And I submit to your Honor, with entire confidence, that probable cause has been shown in this case, to amply warrant the commitment h
ere asked for.”

  BETWEEN THEM, THE ATTORNEYS working for and against Mumler had spoken for hours. Following a brief deliberation, Judge Dowling offered the final word on the spirit photographer in less than a minute. “After careful attention to the case,” he said, “I have come to the conclusion that the prisoner should be discharged.”

  Though the crowded gallery filled with muttering gasps, Dowling pressed on through the increasing din of the courtroom, hoping to be done quickly with the unpleasant task of delivering a ruling that seemed not only to fly in the face of common sense, but to put him on the side of the odd characters who had filled the Tombs court for nearly a month. “However I might believe that trick and deception has been practiced by the prisoner, as I sit here in my capacity of magistrate, I am compelled to decide,” he added with a note of resignation, “that the prosecution has failed to prove the case.”

  To the joy of some of the living and presumably all of the restless dead, William Mumler was free to go.

  PART IV

  Image and Afterlife

  Last portrait of Samuel F. B. Morse. Mathew Brady, 1866.

  CHAPTER 28

  Calm Assurance of a Happy Future

  ON THE ROSTER of prominent photographers who appeared at the proceedings of William Mumler in the spring of 1869, several of the most famous names were conspicuously absent.

  If attorneys for either the prosecution or the defense had asked him to testify, Mathew Brady may have had little interest in damaging his good reputation through association with a freak show—at least one consisting of freaks other than those he had so frequently photographed for Barnum. Or perhaps the accusations of fraud he had endured a few years before made the Mumler affair feel a bit too familiar. More likely, he stayed away simply because he was facing a trial of his own at the time.

  Though he had seen far less of battle than many of the field photographers in his employ, Brady had taken on nearly all the financial risk of making a visual record of the Civil War. Outside the predictable confines of a studio with darkroom supplies readily at hand, photography could be an expensive business—so much so that by the war’s end, Brady was deeply in debt.

  He hoped the nation that had sung his praises as an unequaled chronicler of history might now assume some of the cost. In February, just as the press was beginning to notice Mumler’s new operation on Broadway, the man whose name was synonymous with photography in the city began appealing to Congress to purchase his vast archive of plates and prints. After a similar proposal to the New-York Historical Society was rejected in 1866, he had pinned his hopes for financial salvation on the federal government, which at first gave him every indication of a positive outcome ahead. On February 13, 1869, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts submitted a resolution in his behalf: “Resolved, That the Committee on the Library be instructed to inquire into the expediency of securing for preservation by the government the collection of war views and incidents photographed by Mr. M. B. Brady.”

  Despite assurances from Brady’s many friends in government, the sale stalled repeatedly. By the time it was finalized six years later, Henry Wilson had moved on to become Ulysses S. Grant’s vice president, and Brady, without a champion on Capitol Hill, received for his photographic archive a fraction of its value. His investment in the equipment and personnel required to photograph the war had totaled over $100,000; ultimately, he received only $25,000.

  Enduring multiple bankruptcies and eyesight that continued to deteriorate, Brady carried on in failing health and straitened circumstances for another quarter century. Like his teacher Samuel Morse decades before, he soon lost his wife to illness, and it shook him to the core. Unlike Morse, however, Brady was by then too old to find solace in his work.

  He might have taken some comfort in the myth-making stories already being told about his exploits, however. More than forty years after he made photographs for phrenologists at a lunatic asylum, and twenty years after he envisioned the possibilities of carting cameras into battle, the press began to lionize Brady as “the pioneer of the photographic art in this country.” As he hoped he might be, he was remembered primarily for his efforts during the fight to save the Union. “His pictures of war views are invaluable, and during the rebellion he accompanied the armies and took photographs of their battles and the leading men in them,” the New York World noted nine years before his death in 1896. “He has done more for history in his way than any man in the world.”

  Though he lived in New York throughout the Mumler trial, Samuel Morse likewise kept away from the proceedings. There is no question that they would have piqued his interest. Late in life he became obsessed with making connections between science and religion, and left a sizable sum to Union Theological Seminary to fund an annual lecture on “the relation of the Bible to any of the sciences” and “the vindication of the authenticity of the Bible against attacks made on scientific grounds.” In one of the last photographs of the great inventor, Brady posed his mentor with his long white beard draped over a chestful of medals: Austria’s Great Gold Medal of Science and Arts, France’s Order of the Legion of Honor, a diamond-studded medallion given by the sultan of Turkey, and a half dozen other international decorations. The man who had dreamed of erasing distance succeeded in becoming known across the globe, and despite his interest in matters of the spirit, he probably would have found the Mumler affair beneath him.

  Lacking Morse’s laurels, Brady’s former employee Alexander Gardner had left the East Coast soon after the war for another photographic adventure, taking his mobile developing studio out to the frontier to capture the American West. He was no longer drawn to pictures of mayhem, but in chronicling the rapidly contracting borders of Native American cultures, he photographed death of another sort. When he’d had enough of it, he left his camera and chemicals behind to become the president of a life insurance company.

  Still a tireless worker, Gardner also learned to value leisure. On weekends, he liked to accompany a local Sunday school class on jaunts into a countryside similar to those where he had made his most famous images. The fields beside the dusty roads bloomed with thistle flowers that reminded him of the Scottish Lowlands where he had been born and raised. One day as he rambled with the children and his thoughts, a small girl appeared by his side. She held a spiky purple bloom in her hand, its stem freshly torn.

  “Here’s your flower!” she cried.

  “Thank you, thank you, my bonnie lassie,” Gardner said. “It does a Scotchman proud to his very heart.”

  The same flowers bloomed every fall at Antietam, but if they also reminded him of battlefields, he kept it to himself, content to have found a humble kind of utopia at last.

  Other associates of Brady had not fared as well. Eliza Farnham, the Spiritualist prison matron who had given him his first job and later aspired to serve as an angel of the battlefield, found the scale and horror of death in wartime too much to bear. Shortly after leaving Gettysburg, she fell into an illness from which she did not recover. “From all who visited her during her illness,” it was said, “but one testimony was given—that she rested in calm assurance of a happy future. Her faith as a Spiritualist sustained her in sickness, as it had done in health; and regarding death as a friend, and not as an enemy, she awaited the change with joyful expectancy, asking only patience to meet the delay.”

  Still active on the Spiritualist speaking circuit, J. W. Edmonds delivered Farnham’s eulogy. Soon thereafter he began channeling the spirit George Washington, whose guidance, the judge said, was gravely needed if the nation was to rise again.

  Like Brady, Jeremiah Gurney continued to take pictures almost into the new century. During life, his reputation never recovered from the business defeats he had suffered at Brady’s hands, but decades later his work did find some vindication. One of the photographs he had made of the corpse of President Lincoln—long thought destroyed on the orders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton—was discovered eighty-seven years after it was seized. Publish
ed in Life magazine, which then had a circulation in the millions, it instantly became the most reproduced photograph of the Civil War. Though he had never bested Brady while the two were competing to become the biggest photographer on Broadway, in death—thanks to Life—Gurney had finally come out on top.

  Many of those caught up in the orbit of the Mumler trial were similarly transformed. Not long after his testimony in the Tombs, Marshal Joseph Tooker left law enforcement behind. He dabbled long enough in maritime shipping to earn the title Commodore, and, perhaps influenced by the remarkable drama of the spirit photographer, became a top show-business promoter. As the New York Times reported in 1882, “What Barnum was to the circus, Commodore Tooker was to the theater.”

  Barnum himself rebuilt his museum, only to see it burn again, and then ascended to unexpected respectability. He served in the Connecticut legislature and politely declined when some in the Republican Party asked him to consider running for president.

  P. V. Hickey, whose complaint had set Tooker on Mumler’s trail, gave up science reporting in the 1870s and devoted himself full time to publishing some of America’s first Catholic magazines, as well as a series of books known as the Vatican Library. For these efforts on behalf of his faith, he was repeatedly singled out for praise by bishops throughout the United States and as far as Rome. “To further mark appreciation of these varied and continuous services,” it was said in 1888, “the Holy Father was pleased to invest Chevalier Hickey with the dignity of Knight Commander of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, one of the most exalted degrees of knighthood in the gift of the Holy See.”