Abraham Lincoln’s Ghost the Afterhuman Career of an American Icon

By BILL McKENNY

American cultural productions repeatedly have depicted Abraham Lincoln as "living on" as a spirit after his assassination in 1865. The unprecedented death toll of the Civil War coupled with the uncertain future of African American citizenship. The years after the war led Americans, both black and white, to imagine and re-imagine how a living Lincoln would have responded to contemporary issues in the United States.

As they grappled with Lincoln's legacy for American race relations, artists, writers, and other creators of American culture did not simply remember Lincoln. Still, they envisioned him as an ongoing spiritual presence in everyday life. Immediately after the Civil War, when the American Spiritualist movement encouraged the bereaved to believe that departed loved ones watched over and comforted the living, popular prints and spirit photography depicted Lincoln's ghost remaining to guide the American people. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, actors who played Lincoln on the American stage presented themselves as embodied forms of his spirit, in the process eschewing Lincoln's political achievement of Emancipation in favor of sentimental portrayals of his boyhood and family life. Fine artists and illustrators turned to Lincoln's spirit as they attempted to use their work to promote African American equality.

Walt Disney, the Lincoln Audio animation theme park attraction creator, used technological means to bring to life a robotic Lincoln that could never die. And ordinary Americans from all walks of life have been drawn to the places that Lincoln lived and the objects he owned in the belief that they serve as a conduit to his spirit. These demonstrate how memory functions as a set of ideas about the past and as a living force in the present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: vincenzo nappi
• Release date: Sep 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201068080

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Abraham Lincoln the sixteenth president of the U.S

The presidency of Abraham Lincoln began on March 4, 1861, when he was proclaimed the 16th President of the United States, and ended with his homicide on April 15, 1865, 42 days into his second term. He was the first member of the recently established Republican Party elected to the presidency. Succeeded by Vice President Andrew Johnson. Lincoln presided over the Union victory in the American Civil War, which dominated his presidency.

Abraham Lincoln took office following the 1860 presidential election, in which he won a plurality of the popular vote in a four-candidate field. Almost every Lincoln's votes came from the Northern United States, as the Republicans held little appeal to voters in the Southern United States. A prior Whig, Lincoln ran on a political platform opposed to the spread of slavery in the territories. His election served as the immediate moment for the outbreak of the Civil War. After being sworn in as president, Lincoln rejected to accept any resolution that would end in Southern secession from the Union. The Civil War began weeks into Lincoln's presidency with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, a federal setting located within the boundaries of the Confederacy.

Lincoln was called on to manage both the political and military faces of the Civil War, fronting challenges in both aspects. He was the commander-in-chief and ordered the suspension of the constitutionally-protected right to habeas corpus in the state of Maryland to suppress Confederate sympathizers.  Lincoln also became the first president to institute a military draft. As the Union faced early defeats in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War, he cycled through various military commanders during the war, finally settling on General Ulysses S. Grant, who had led the Union to several victories in the Western Theater. Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed about 20,000 slaves in Confederate-held territory and established emancipation as a Union war goal.

In 1865,the President was instrumental in the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which made slavery unconstitutional. He also presided over the passage of important domestic legislation, including the first of the Homestead Acts, the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, and the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862. He ran for new elections on the National Union ticket, in 1864, which was supported by War Democrats in addition to Republicans. Though he feared he might lose the contest, he defeated his former subordinate, General George B. McClellan of the Democratic Party, in a landslide. Months after the election, Grant would basically end the war by defeating the Confederate army led by General Robert E. Lee. Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, five days after the surrender of Lee, left the final challenge of reconstructing the nation to others.

After his death, he was portrayed as the liberator of the slaves, the savior of the Union, and a martyr for the cause of freedom. Political historians have long held Lincoln in high regard for his accomplishments and personal characteristics. Alongside George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he has been consistently ranked both by scholars and the public as one of the top three greatest presidents, often as number one.

Lincoln’s ghost

Since he died in 1865 , President Abraham Lincoln has been an iconic American figure depicted, usually favorably or heroically, in many forms. Lincoln has often been portrayed by Hollywood, almost always in a flattering light.

Today there is a common thought that the White House is haunted. The stories of presences in the building are innumerable, and the most frequent one’s concern President Abraham Lincoln, to the point that his ghost is known as the Ghost of the White House.

Lincoln's ghost has haunted the White House since his death in 1865.

The testimonies are many, impressive, and many are from presidents and heads of state.

Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady, said she often felt Lincoln's presence in the building, and at those times her dog, Fala, barked for no reason. Eisenhower’s press secretary James Hagerty and Liz Carpenter, First Lady Bird Johnson's secretary, have both felt the presence many times. Unidentified footsteps were also heard, also outside Lincoln's bedroom. President Truman also heard them when he slept in that room, along with knocks on the bedroom door.

Even though there are also visual testimonials. In addition to several unidentified witnesses, a mystery concerns the experience of Mary Eben, Eleanor Roosevelt's secretary, who saw Lincoln putting on his boots in his room. This caused the woman to flee screaming, triggering an alert among the secret services.

The First Lady Grace Coolidge said that she saw Lincoln's ghost standing in the window of the Yellow Oval Room, looking out. Theodore Roosevelt and Maureen Reagan saw the specter, but perhaps the most famous incident happened in 1942, when Wilhelmina of Holland, a guest at the White House, heard a knock on the door. Going to the door she saw Lincoln in a suit and top hat, and she passed out immediately.

Another strange anecdote concerns British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In the room where he was staying, he had taken a long hot bath, drinking Scotch and smoking a cigar to relax. When he came out of the bathroom, naked and with a cigar in his mouth, he walked into the next room and was amazed to see Lincoln standing by the fireplace. Churchill, who was not easily surprised, said: Good evening, Mr. President. I seem to be at a disadvantage!.

So, Abraham Lincoln smiled and disappeared, while Churchill smiled embarrassedly.

A lot of stories about Abraham Lincoln and his ghost are impressive today in the image of common people.

William Mumler hardly blinked when a mysterious woman in black entered his photography studio in Boston. The year was 1870, and by then he was no stranger to bizarre goings-on, let alone the eccentricities of his clientele. Mrs. Lindall, as she introduced herself, swept to the portrait chair with all of the authority of a queen, hiding her features behind a crepe veil while Mumler readied his famous photographic process. His plates in place, his lighting perfect, Mumler inquired whether Madam would remove her shawl so that he might capture her face. With a storied flourish, Mrs. Lindall shed her disguise to reveal Mary Todd Lincoln, widow of the deceased president—and an ardent believer in Spiritualism.Mumler and Mrs. Lincoln made for a strange pair.

One a hapless mystic turned charlatan, the other a bereaved widow turned eccentric, neither had survived the turbulent years after the Civil War with reputation intact. Mumler thought of himself as the inventor of spirit photography, a self-professed innocent who had stumbled across the first visual proof of the Great Beyond one day when he discovered the translucent image of a young girl in an 1861 self-portrait.  When a prominent Spiritualist circulated the photograph in newspapers claiming it as the first photographic image of a spirit, Mumler achieved instant celebrity and moved to New York to open a new shop on Broadway. Charging ten dollars apiece for spirit photographs (with no guarantee that the spirits would choose to show themselves on film), Mumler made a good living until he found himself on trial for fraud in 1869.

The City of New York’s deployment of an all-star prosecution featuring Elbridge T. Gerry as an attorney and P.T. Barnum as a witness evokes the currency of the debate over the existence of spirits during this period in America as well as Mumler’s central role in it. The court dismissed his charges when the prosecution could not expose his process as counterfeit, but even though Mumler walked away without a blemish on his record, the stain on his character proved permanent. He was on a downward slide