Necromancers, Killers and Presidents, Summoned From the Pages of History

IN THE HOUSES OF THEIR DEAD: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits, by Terry Alford

Is there anything more unknowable than a politician’s soul? Even a figure as exhaustively documented as Abraham Lincoln — whole tomes have been devoted to his marriage, his melancholy, his hats — remains in some essential way a mystery, the private man subsumed by two-plus centuries of folklore and iconography. But he was of course a person who lived and loved and grieved like any other — and like his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, found perhaps some solace in the prospect of an afterworld still reachable from this one.

At least that’s the case intermittently made by Terry Alford’s “In the Houses of Their Dead,” a well-sourced if slight piece of sideways biography that often strains to justify its thesis, but makes a lively study of two wildly disparate clans nonetheless. The ties that bound an American president and an acting scion from Maryland are somewhat legend now, a series of kinships and coincidences that range from the quotidian (both men had difficult fathers and revered Shakespeare) to the genuinely strange (Booth’s brother Edwin once purportedly saved Lincoln’s eldest son’s life on a train platform).

What’s sure is that both men were products of their time — an age, Alford writes in his colorful introduction, of great social and scientific progress, but also one where “millions of Americans clung to beliefs that seemed irrational. They believed in ghosts. They studied omens, dreaded comets and feared witchcraft. Apocalyptic writing flourished and credence was given to visions, spells and curses. Prophets and mystics abounded.” And there was profit in all that, naturally: dividends duly pursued by the parade of charlatans, schemers and true believers who parlayed their “mystical” gifts and parlor tricks to gain access to the highest halls of 19th-century power and celebrity.

Whether Lincoln ever put real stock in the self-proclaimed psychics and seers who streamed through the White House during his tenure there, largely at his wife Mary’s behest, is as often as not contradicted in the text. Though his family belonged to a Baptist church, Lincoln himself was a natural iconoclast who “had no particular religion,” according to his own stepmother, and put little faith in the concept of eternal damnation and other standard Christian orthodoxy of the day. He also, Alford dutifully notes, stopped well short of Mary’s keen, even consuming passion for spiritualism, once confiding to an Army officer that while he took solace in the words of mediums who claimed to channel the dearly departed, he understood that “it just wasn’t real. Communications from the other world were delusions, he said.”

The Booth family, by and large, proved more easily moved when it came to the metaphysical. Their patriarch, Junius Brutus Booth, one of the most famed thespians of his day, was also famously peculiar, a man who held funerals for pigeons and once dug up his daughter’s grave and attempted to revive her by sucking out her “impure” blood. Several sons succeeded him in his career path, and his idiosyncrasies: Edwin had an abiding fear of ivy vines and peacock feathers; Joe, the youngest, once absconded to Australia without warning, then spent years there on some kind of vision quest.

As for Lincoln’s eventual killer? “His mind was a haunted house,” according to one contemporary journalist quoted here. But even Alford, whose 2015 book, “Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth,” was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, never really roots out the source of the mania that turned a celebrated performer of no particular political will or creed (though he really seemed to hate house cats) into a foaming radical willing not just to die for the Southern cause, but to unseat democracy. Booth’s fanatical conviction that Lincoln had kingly designs on a dictatorship — and that he alone could stop it — somehow managed to pass, it seems, as one more quirk of an artistic temperament.