The Apparitionists

by Peter Manseau

  “This photograph was taken of myself, by myself, on Sunday, when there was not a living soul in the room beside me,” he wrote. Realizing that the spirit in the chair was not just anyone but a girl he once had known, he then acknowledged for the first time that he had begun to believe the camera had the ability to peer beyond the ultimate darkness. “The form on my right,” he added, “I recognize as my cousin who passed away about twelve years since.”

  If one believes Mumler’s account of these events, the matter might have ended there. It is of course entirely possible that all of this was a carefully orchestrated plan designed to launch a new business enterprise, either for the engraver who peddled digestive remedies on the side or for the medium who owned a photo studio and diagnosed illnesses with spectral assistance. Yet as the press all across the country would soon report the story, it all seems too haphazard to have been anyone’s design.

  Dr. Gardner took the picture away and Mumler went back to his engraving. A week later, Mumler received a copy of the Herald of Progress from New York. There he read not only a description of his short meeting with the doctor, but also the words he had jotted on the back of the photograph—published verbatim but without his consent.

  The effect of finding his name prominently associated with so outrageous a claim brought all his doubts raging back. He knew practically nothing of photography, and even less of ghosts, yet here he was on record speaking with authority about both. “I felt, on reading this statement, considerably mortified in seeing my name in public print in support of what at that time I thought to be a kind of misrepresentation,” he said. His only hope was that New York was far enough away that nothing more would come of it. With his own life largely confined to a short stretch of Washington Street, “I thought nobody would be damaged much,” he said.

  But then news of his peculiar photo appeared on the very block where he passed most of his days. The Banner of Light republished in full the story from the Herald of Progress and even supplied additional information. “It not only gave the description of the picture,” Mumler realized with alarm, “but stated where in Boston it was taken.”

  There it was in the evening edition, in bold type, mailed to tens of thousands of homes: 258 Washington Street. Hannah’s address.

  He rushed to the studio to tell her what had happened. Fearing the worst, he intended to explain the “mischief” he had done, perhaps hoping it would not reflect badly on the business, and in turn not adversely influence its proprietor’s patience with his presence. But it was too late. The gallery’s reception room was packed with Spiritualists and the simply curious, all wanting to see the suddenly famous image and inquire about how it had been made.

  He had not been a believer. Just a moment before, he had felt embarrassed to have his name associated with a story whose truth he questioned. But here were all these learned gentlemen insisting that he had done something extraordinary.

  At her usual spot behind the counter, Mrs. Hannah Green Stuart was as magnetic as ever. She looked up as soon as he walked in. Despite his fears, she was pleased enough to see him that she called out over the din of the crowd.

  “Here comes Mr. Mumler!” the future Mrs. Mumler said.

  Mathew Brady, self-portrait, circa 1875.

  CHAPTER 6

  A Lounging, Listless Madhouse

  FOR THE FIRST generation of American photographers, Samuel Morse’s studio was an open aperture letting in the light of a new way of seeing the world. By the early 1840s, the great inventor had relocated his experiments with chemicals and sunshine from the university rooftop where he had made closed-eyed portraits of his daughter Susan to a new space specially constructed for him by his younger brothers.

  Richard and Sidney Morse had moved to Manhattan some years before, and together founded the New York Observer, which they published out of a six-story building they owned at 140 Nassau Street. The eldest child of Reverend Morse, Finley was still far less financially secure than the two youngest, but his siblings were intrigued by his forays into the scientific realm. On a newly added seventh floor, the Morse brothers built a glass-enclosed space for Finley’s camera, then carved out a parlor on the third level where clients might inspect the images he had made while awaiting sittings of their own.

  When Mathew B. Brady first met Morse in 1839 to learn from him the Daguerrean arts, his instructor was working tirelessly to support three children in an equal number of occupations. Though still new, Morse’s rooms at the Observer were littered with archaeological layers of his many lives: paints, brushes, and canvases; spools of wire and wooden telegraph keys; chemical bottles of various volumes and playing card–sized plates of silvered copper, which then were procurable from any hardware store but rarely put to the purpose they found here.

  Brady was just eighteen years old, an Irish immigrants’ son from upstate New York. He had come to the city with dreams of becoming a painter and had shown a genuine youthful talent. During his adolescence he had come under the instruction of the artist William Page, an oil painter who had studied in Europe with the intention of becoming the American Titian. At the time Brady met him, Page had recently returned to art after briefly abandoning it to study for the Presbyterian ministry; his work maintained a theological tinge ever after, culminating in a controversy he caused with his painting Head of Christ: “It is the startling realism of the picture which most offends the multitude,” a Boston arts journal said. Page’s early influence likely got Brady interested in pursuing “startling realism” of a different kind—one he could learn only from Samuel Morse.

  To a teenager from the hinterlands, Morse’s studio would have seemed either a wizard’s workshop or a laboratory for concocting new realities from scarce resources and endless research. In truth it was both. Morse by then was “tied hand and foot during the day endeavoring to realize something from the Daguerreotype portraits,” while also painting the occasional canvas for money, and remaining hard at work preparing patents for his invention the telegraph and appealing to Congress to fund its implementation.

  He would eventually get that funding in 1843, but not before the House of Representatives debated whether or not Morse’s invention made use of forces more spiritual than electric. Delaying the vote on a bill authorizing $30,000 for “a series of experiments to be made in order to test the merits of Morse’s electro-magnetic telegraph,” a congressman from Tennessee snidely proposed an amendment. “As the present Congress had done much to encourage science,” Representative Cave Johnson said, he did not wish to see “the science of mesmerism neglected and overlooked.” He therefore proposed that one half of the appropriation be given to the prominent mesmerist Theophilus Fisk so that he might carry out his experiments in electrobiology, elsewhere called “the latest and most profitable form of Scientific trickery.”

  A congressman from North Carolina meanwhile suggested he would accept this amendment if the gentleman from Tennessee was the experimental subject. The chair of the appropriations committee ended the discussion by saying that “it would require a scientific analysis to determine how far the magnetism of mesmerism was analogous to that to be employed in telegraphs.”

  Scientific shortcomings of Congress aside, that Morse was making progress simultaneously on the telegraph and the daguerreotype indicates something of the marvel of tenacity he had become in the fifteen years since Lucretia’s death. Yet his achievements were rarely sufficient in his own estimation; they could never fill the void that had opened with her loss, even if he hoped one day to reach across it.

  And all his effort came at a stiff price. Morse still maintained his university painting studio, but seldom visited it. A new resident of the same building in 1841—the year Brady arrived in the city—recalled once catching a glimpse inside its open door. “Every object in it bore indubitable signs of unthrift and neglect,” he wrote. “The statuettes, busts, and models of various kinds were covered with dust and cobwebs; dusty canvases were faced to the wall, and stumps of brushes and
scraps of paper littered the floor. The only signs of industry consisted of a few masterly crayon drawings, and little luscious studies of color pinned to the wall.” A janitor at NYU explained, “You will have an artist for a neighbor, though he is not here much of late; he seems to be getting rather shiftless; he is wasting his time over some silly invention, a machine by which he expects to send messages from one place to another. He is a very good painter, and might do well if he would only stick to his business; but, Lord! The idea of telling by a little streak of lightning what a body is saying at the other end of it.”

  Though a budding painter himself, young Brady was not troubled that Morse had moved away from pure art. He was impressed by the potential of the operation he saw on Nassau Street and immediately signed on to become one of the master’s students in the daguerreotype process. He likely paid for the privilege: another Morse pupil of the time noted that his teacher claimed with only slight exaggeration that if his students failed to pay on time, he might starve to death. To do his part in preventing this from happening, and to make his way in the city generally, Brady took a job as a clerk at Alexander Turney Stewart’s Irish linens shop on Broadway, across from City Hall Park.

  Neither his studies nor his employment lasted very long, and soon Brady struck out on his own. Good with his hands and mechanically inclined, he advertised two kinds of business at two different addresses by the time he reached his twenty-fifth year. He was at once a “jewelry, miniature, and surgical case manufacturer” at 187 Broadway and the sole proprietor of a Daguerrean gallery at 207 Broadway.

  It was the latter that would make his name. Directly across from P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, which by 1846 claimed nearly a half million visitors a year, Brady’s studio was poised to capitalize on the seemingly endless foot traffic and establish itself as a new star of the arts in the fast-growing city. But first he needed to hone his craft as a portrait artist. That opportunity presented itself in a most unlikely place, and thanks to a woman who would become one of the leading lights of Spiritualism.

  LIKE A MESSAGE IN a bottle bobbing in the East River, Blackwell’s Island was crammed with the desperation of the lost.

  Less than two miles long and a thousand feet wide, its 135 acres was home to New York City’s penitentiary, almshouse, and lunatic asylum. The dangerous, the hated, the penniless, the forgotten—hundreds lived in dank cells of solitary confinement, hundreds more in vast halls as filthy and crowded as the steerage holds that had only recently brought most of them to America. Of the 1,239 prisoners in the penitentiary in 1846, the foreign born numbered 843; many of them had never set foot in Manhattan.

  When Charles Dickens visited in the early 1840s, he was aghast. The island, he said, had “a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful.” He watched a convict thrust his hands through a metal grate, grasping for air as if he could stuff it into his lungs. Another “flung down in a heap upon the ground, with his head against the bars, like a wild beast.” With some of his bleakest works about the struggles of the London underclass still to come, he apparently found no shortage of inspiration in New York. “The moping idiot, cowering down with long dishevelled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror,” he wrote. “The terrible crowd with which these halls and galleries were filled, so shocked me, that I abridged my stay within the shortest limits, and declined to see that portion of the building in which the refractory and violent were under closer restraint.”

  Blackwell’s Island itself had a rocky foundation from which the penitentiary’s developers had dug deep quarries. After the prison had been constructed of this fine building stone, prisoners were put to work cutting more of it for use in the lunatic asylum and the almshouse, to which soon were added a hospital and workhouse. The workhouse made the island a moneymaker; its profits were published in the newspaper as evidence of civic money well spent.

  To city planners, keeping the criminal, the mad, the sick, and the poor confined together on an island made perfect sense. The various institutions serving these diverse populations were “sufficiently contiguous to each other for all purposes of convenience,” a report noted, and “sufficiently remote from the city to be protected from contagion.”

  For readers still struggling to form a mental picture, Dickens included a poetic aside: “Make the rain pour down, outside, in torrents. Put the everlasting stove in the midst; hot, and suffocating, and vaporous, as a witch’s cauldron. Add a collection of gentle odours such as would arise from a thousand mildewed umbrellas, wet through, and a thousand buck-baskets, full of half-washed linen—and there is the prison, as it was that day.”

  That the author happened to see Blackwell’s Island during a storm may have been a happy accident in terms of making its Dickensian nature immediately apparent. Outside the stone buildings, after all, the island might have seemed lovely to him on a sunny day. “The scenery upon it is unsurpassed for beauty by any in the vicinity of our city,” an official report noted. But its true darkness had nothing to do with the landscape or the weather.

  Four years after Dickens made his abridged tour of the penitentiary, young Mathew Brady was called to the same facility on an assignment that promised to produce images that would allow his work to be seen by the public for the first time.

  Chastened by accounts like those Dickens published in his 1842 American Notes, the State of New York hired a reform-minded progressive to oversee one of its penal institutions. Eliza Wood Farnham, who like Brady and the oldest of the Spiritualist Fox sisters had been born in upstate New York in the first quarter of the century, arrived at America’s first long-term lockup for women in the wake of a riot. “Violent battles are frequent,” a contemporary report said; “knives have been known to be drawn.” Opened in 1839 as the women’s wing of Sing Sing, the Mount Pleasant Female Prison stood on a hilltop overlooking the Hudson, “a handsome building . . . with a Doric portico of imposing proportions.”

  Like the beauty of Blackwell’s Island, however, its impressive architecture masked chronic abuse. For breaking the prison’s rule of silence, women were put in straitjackets, doused with water until they nearly drowned, and gagged. Sing Sing’s administrators regarded the latter punishment as a crucial difference between discipline in the men’s and women’s wings. “The gag has sometimes been applied,” one prison official said, “but it has been only among the females that it has been rendered absolutely necessary!”

  Eliza Farnham hoped to change all this. She came to the position through the influence of the liberal lawyer and future judge John W. Edmonds, who was then a state inspector of prisons. Edmonds had made it a point to limit such medieval practices as the use of the cat-o’-nine-tails for whipping prisoners, and Farnham followed along on the reforming path he had blazed. First she abolished the rule of silence and with it the hard punishments formerly used to enforce it. Next she allowed inmates to grow flowers, listen to music, and receive visitors—all of which were essential, she said, to maintaining order without the lash. Finally she opened a prison library and encouraged the reading of novels. A writer herself, she believed literature fostered moral development.

  Her reading list for prisoners was not limited to fiction. She also encouraged books on phrenology, the hugely popular pseudoscience that claimed the shape of one’s head was the key to understanding character and potential. She had been introduced to the practice by New York City’s leading phrenological family, the brothers Orson and Lorenzo Fowler (authors of The Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology, which included directions on how to assess oneself), and Lorenzo’s wife, Lydia Folger Fowler (author of Familiar Lessons on Phrenology: Designed for the Use of Children and Youth).

  At the time she was appointed matron of Mount Pleasant, Farnham was particularly taken with an English pamphlet that applied he
ad-measuring to her current work, Marmaduke B. Sampson’s Treatise on Criminal Jurisprudence Considered in Relation to Cerebral Organization. Leveraging the status of her new position, she made up her mind to see Sampson’s work published in the United States. She intended not only to republish it but to fully revise it for an American audience. She would write an introduction and appendices, doubling the length of the original text, and include copious footnotes quoting supporting materials. Perhaps most important in terms of marketing the book, she would commission illustrations designed to attract a wider audience than the usual “treatise” might. Living so close to the world’s new daguerreotype capital, she recognized the power held by images—portraits particularly—when it came to winning public attention and introducing novel ideas in a sympathetic way. She only had to find the right photographer to go with her to Blackwell’s Island to capture the likenesses of the city’s castaways.

  Farnham’s publisher, D. Appleton & Company, was then right across the street from Brady’s newly opened gallery. The founder’s son, William Henry Appleton, was at the time overseeing the publications side of the family business, and walked by a sign reading BRADY’S DAGUERREAN SALOON whenever he entered his office at 200 Broadway.

  The young artist likely got the job not because he was the best, but because he was nearby, and willing.

  Balloon view of Boston, the first aerial photograph of an American city. James Wallace Black, 1860.

  CHAPTER 7

  My God! Is It Possible?

  EARLY ONE MORNING in October 1860, while the rest of Boston lingered under blankets to put off exposure to winter temperatures come early, a respectable middle-aged photographer named James Wallace Black prepared to ascend to the heavens.