The Apparitionists

by Peter Manseau

  Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison with a shackled spirit. William Mumler, 1862–1875.

  CHAPTER 9

  No Shadow of Trickery

  J. W. BLACK WAS not the only Boston photographer flummoxed by the images emanating from 258 Washington Street. One of Black’s former employers, L. H. Hale, tried to re-create the process and produce spirit photographs of his own. But as the Banner of Light reported, Hale could imitate Mumler’s ghosts only through the use of two negatives and by printing one image atop the other. “He says he cannot see how they can be produced on the card with only one negative,” the Spiritualist paper noted with some delight, “which is the case with all Mumler’s spirit pictures.”

  With the local photographic elite unnerved, more credulous souls flocked to Mumler’s door, which, though it still was called Mrs. Stuart’s studio, was now known to all as the workplace of Mr. and Mrs. Mumler.

  When William and Hannah married, their partnership instantly became as much professional as domestic. Always a presence behind the counter at the gallery, she now stepped in front of it, participating in the theater surrounding Mumler’s art.

  If the spirit world refused to cooperate and the ethereal images could not be fixed upon the glass, the photographer or the sitters themselves would eventually ask Mrs. Mumler, “Do you see any spirits present?”

  “Yes, I see a beautiful spirit,” she would reply, and then describe in detail the ghostly form whose portrait would soon be written in light.

  Her magnetism was as strong as ever. In fact, it was she alone for whom Mumler first claimed supernatural abilities. His role in the excitement that had become their livelihood and life’s work, he insisted, was as mysterious to him as to anyone. To some doubters, his frequent befuddled failure to produce spirit images was a clear suggestion that this was a man without guile. “I have seen several pictures and there is a real look about them all. I examined the process of taking, and could find no shadow of trickery,” a correspondent for the venerable abolitionist newspaper the Liberator noted. “The medium’s air and manner, his non-success, his disappointment, all indicate reality.”

  Not that Mumler was wholly without explanations for the wonders over which he presided. To him, as miraculous as this new moment in the relationship between the realms of the living and the dead might be, its photographic manifestation was simply a matter of science. “One of the most frequently repeated arguments brought against the possibility of spirit-photography,” he said, “is the assumption that what the eye cannot see cannot be photographed.”

  This, Mumler argued, was far from the case. Consider electricity, the unparalleled marvel of the age. When one passes an electric charge through a vacuum in a dark room, if the current is strong enough it will be seen by the naked eye. If the current is weak, it will seem to human observers to be nonexistent. If allowed a long enough exposure time, however, a camera will record its low-wattage life. “This is a remarkable fact,” Mumler said; “indeed, it borders on the wonderful, that a phenomenon invisible to the human eye should have been, so to speak, seen by the photographic lens.”

  For further evidence, one had only to ask those who emerged blinking in the sunlight of Washington Street with a photograph by Mumler wrapped in brown paper. Impossible to make it home without opening the package on the sidewalk, so great was the hunger to see the unseen. Among his satisfied customers: Mr. Ewell of Boston had a beloved sister who died of consumption, but now again beside him together they stood. Mr. Miller of Malden mourned a son small enough to dandle on his knee, and here the boy was, still sitting right there. Mr. Stebbins lost a child. Dr. Main lost a wife. Mr. Hazard lost a wife. Each entered the Mumlers’ studio with a private ache and left with a heart filled.

  They counted among their early clients some of Boston’s most influential families—men and women of means who came to the spirit photographer because of either a recent loss or a nagging emptiness they could not name.

  In the latter category, the unassuming Alvin Adams stood out as a thoroughly practical man who suddenly felt himself haunted by the implications of his success.

  Since 1839, while the nation’s artists and dreamers had concocted fantastical ways of erasing distance with sunlight and copper wire, Adams had done much the same with nothing but a carpetbag. He had been thirty-five years old when he offered to fill as large a case as he could carry with parcels and transport them by steamship and train between New York and Boston. The business he started with that trip, Adams Express, soon became the largest shipping firm in the country.

  In a dozen years, Adams’s company grew from one man with a big bag to three hundred employees and offices as far away as San Francisco, Australia, and Japan. In 1854, the company moved gold, silver, cash, and other valuables totaling more than a million dollars a day. By the 1860s, it had so much currency in circulation it served as a de facto bank, financing much of the construction of California during the Gold Rush and handling payroll for both the Union and the Confederate armies when the Civil War broke out.

  The war had of course hampered the shipping business, but not as badly as one might expect. When it became unlawful for Adams Express to ship goods to the Confederacy, the company split in two—one branch for the North, one branch for the South, both owned by Alvin Adams.

  The war had other effects as well. Inevitably, Adams and his agents shipped weapons south. But as the fighting raged on, some unexpected shipments also began to come north. “Those ominous, long pine boxes, that betoken the dead remains of those who went to the war, now dead and long lost, crowd the office of Adams Express Company,” one account said.

  Death was, Adams no doubt realized, a growth industry. And when the dead couldn’t come to Adams, Adams would go to the dead. He opened satellite offices near the places where the greatest number of casualties could be found. Controlling the majority of shipping throughout much of the country, his firm was the natural choice to facilitate the Union army’s corpse recovery service. The surgeon in charge of Fort Monroe in Virginia asked those interested in locating the remains of loved ones to contact Adams Express directly. At a cost of $30 for digging, boxing, and shipping, he said, “they will exhume the body and send it wherever desired.”

  Detailed instructions were published regarding the certification Adams Express required to prove a body had been properly disinfected and packed. Other reports noted with macabre fascination that the metal coffins preferred by the shipping agents were often seen as more valuable than their contents. “The corpse was placed in the casket,” an Adams employee explained of one such instance, “and as the weather was warm and the train did not leave until the next morning, the case was placed on the platform at the depot. What was our surprise the next morning to find the corpse lying on the platform and the casket gone!”

  Whether shipping weapons to the front or carrying bodies back home, Adams was paid nicely in either direction. To a man closed to all concerns except for the bottom line this might not have registered. But Adams was a committed Spiritualist and had been almost from the beginning.

  Some still recalled with joy a séance held at his residence in Watertown, outside Boston, several years before. A one-thousand-pound piano with three men sitting on top was said to have risen off the ground with the aid of unseen spiritual agents. “The instrument was handled with such masterly freedom,” one witness claimed, “that the invisible agents therewith beat the time to ‘Hail Columbia.’” A skeptic among the believers that night insisted it must be a collective hallucination, but for that line of argument the Spiritualists had a ready answer. “When the piano is raised, slip your foot under it,” they told the unbeliever, “and if your toes are not pinched, you may safely infer that the psychological hypothesis is the true one.”

  Such merriment, however, came long before the war. When Adams visited Mumler and asked for a sitting, he had more serious matters in mind.

  Mrs. Mumler led him to a chair lit by the sun and notified her husband that conditi
ons seemed right for an apparition to appear. A few minutes later, the shipping magnate was not surprised to discover a spirit emerge on the glass. Though he had posed by himself and had noted only the photographer and his wife in the room, beside him on the image he saw “a boy seated, and intently reading a book.” A nephew who had died, he believed, was now appearing in a form “as perfect as if one in the flesh had sat before the camera.” It was a vision of youth interrupted, as it had been for the occupants of all those metal boxes he moved across the country like coins on a table.

  No less haunted was Eliza Babbitt, widow of the great inventor and entrepreneur Isaac Babbitt, who had died shortly before Mumler took his first picture. Like Mumler, Babbitt had been trained as a metalworker, primarily a goldsmith. He had branched out far more lucratively throughout his career, however. As a young man he had successfully forged the first American-made brass cannon, and later developed a flexible alloy known as Babbitt metal, which was considered so essential to the rise of industry in the northern states that Congress awarded him $20,000. He filed patents for a number of inventions, including an improved method of honing blades without a sharpener’s wheel, and developed soap powders sold throughout the nation. “Babbitt’s Cytherean Cream of Soap,” one advertisement declared, “is intended to take the place of all other soaps.” Because his recipe could cheaply produce mass quantities of disinfectant of the kind required by armies on the move, it would become useful in unforeseen ways. In 1860, he sold the formula for Boston Chemical Soap Powder for $6,000, a small fortune at the time.

  As it had for Adams, the dissolution of the Union corresponded with the most successful time in Babbitt’s career. His cannon-making years were well behind him, as was the need to personally oversee the sometimes dangerous processes of smelting metals and mixing chemicals, but they caught up with him as the war began. In the parlance of the day, Babbitt lost his mind. He was given over to the care of a mental institution, and he died there soon after. Though a lifetime spent inhaling toxic fumes may have contributed to his madness, his obituary noted, “the fact that Isaac Babbitt died in an insane asylum does not detract from the merits of his formulas.”

  Mumler made a picture for Eliza Babbitt showing her husband as she had known him: a proud self-made man before he had been undone by the lingering effects of the labors of his youth. His head had been shaved at the asylum, and sure enough, his spirit appeared bald in the image—a detail that was, Mumler claimed, “a remarkable test” of its veracity. The widow wrote a note of thanks to Mrs. Mumler, which quickly found its way into the Spiritualist press:

  This is to certify that I, Mrs. Isaac Babbitt, have a Spirit Photograph of my husband, taken at your rooms, by Mr. Mumler. It is recognized by all that have seen it, who knew him when he was upon earth, as a perfect likeness, and I am myself satisfied that his spirit was present, although invisible to mortals.

  Yours, with respect,

  Mrs. Isaac Babbitt

  The Adams and Babbitt families were only the most noteworthy of the many who came to see Mumler during the first few weeks of his renown. The throng became so insistent that he was forced to limit himself to four sittings a day. After that, he said, the spirits were still willing, but his flesh was too weak to go on.

  Parents saw visions of children gone for years. Widows who had seen husbands broken by dementia before death found them whole again. Widowers who missed wives as intensely as Samuel Morse missed his Lucretia looked upon their faces at last. And tears pooled on Washington Street like collodion on photo glass.

  Mathew Brady advertisement, New York Herald, August 21, 1856.

  CHAPTER 10

  A Craving for Light

  BY THE TIME Mathew Brady finished his work on Blackwell’s Island, his First Premium Daguerrian Miniature Gallery was just one small booth in the most crowded marketplace in the city. Instant image makers were now ubiquitous. Reformed painters, former jewelry makers, lapsed corner-store chemists, mechanical tinkerers of every kind, they all wanted a piece of a faddish pastime that was becoming a booming industry. “There is hardly a block in New York that has not one or more of these concerns upon it,” one tourist noted, “and some of them a dozen or more.”

  The stretch of Broadway chosen by Brady was firmly in the latter category. Since the introduction of daguerreotypes a few years before, photography studios had proliferated across lower Manhattan at such an alarming rate that one wag, writing for the penny newspaper Brother Jonathan, clucked that there were now just two types of New Yorkers: “the beggars and the takers of likeness by daguerreotype.” It would soon be impossible, he continued, to find anyone who had not had “his likeness done by the sun.”

  Like Brady, the many self-taught cameramen now selling portraits on Broadway had chosen the spot because it was the most bustling thoroughfare in the city. The corner of Fulton Street especially attracted a steady stream of not only native New Yorkers but out-of-towners eager to take in such sights as P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. Since its opening in 1841, the vast curiosity cabinet had been among the nation’s most popular tourist destinations. Locating his studio directly across the intersection was the first and perhaps best marketing decision Brady would ever make.

  Occupying nearly half a block at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, the American Museum was a vast temple of diversion, and was to many visitors from the hinterlands the only reason the stench and danger of New York were worth the trip. Across the bustling intersection, the Ionic columns of St. Paul’s Church gave the area the appearance of upright piety, but the stretch of roadway between the chapel and the museum was well known as “the standing-place for all kinds of cheats and robbers,” as one contemporary chronicler recalled, “all on the watch for stray countrymen, strangers, and other green and unwary travelers.”

  Of such grifters, Phineas Taylor Barnum was indisputably king. His museum was either the greatest collection of novelties and amusements in the greatest city on earth, or it was, as highbrow scoffers complained of this constantly evolving populist cathedral, an “ill-looking, ungainly, rambling structure” containing a “paltry collection of preposterous things.” Either way, Mathew Brady had scored a coup in opening his gallery so close to an address that was the cause of constant conversation.

  Unfortunately, he was not alone. Of the two hundred photographic studios in the city, the lion’s share were within the same square quarter mile. None were as close to the museum as Brady’s, but all were an easy stroll for potential clients on the hunt for better images at a lower price. To begin with, there was the local salon of John Plumbe, who by the mid-1840s operated studios not only at 251 Broadway, but in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Albany, and Boston as well. A few doors down there was Edward Anthony, soon to become the largest supplier of photographic chemicals in the United States. Down at number 57, the agent of Monsieur Daguerre himself had set up shop, as if to remind Americans of the Frenchman’s claim as the founder of the art.

  Many of Brady’s other nearby competitors proved to be talentless bumblers producing inferior products, and as a result did not stay in business long. Yet as further bad luck would have it, the very best in the city was less than a block away.

  Jeremiah Gurney, ten years Brady’s senior, had established himself as a high-end practitioner well before the younger man had taken his first mug shots on Blackwell’s Island. Gurney had likewise been a student of Morse, and he considered himself heir to the professor’s position at the top of the profession. He was master not only of technique, but in selling himself to a public that for the most part did not know what to expect from a visit to a photo studio. With ever more aspiring daguerreotypists setting up shop around him, Gurney reassured the cautious consumer by noting his experience whenever possible. “As in every art and science,” he said in one advertisement, “years of study and practice are necessary to success . . . Especially is it indispensable in an art that has progressed so rapidly as the Daguerreotype.”

  In his own first advertiseme
nts, Brady was barely willing to engage in such salesmanship. He hoped his product would speak for itself, failing to grasp the necessity of first bringing potential clients to his door.

  FIRST PREMIUM NEW YORK DAGUERRIAN MINIATURE GALLERY

  Corner of Broadway and Fulton Street, entrance third floor.

  Where may be had miniatures which, for beauty of color, tone and effect can at all times commend themselves; and if not superior, are equal to any that have been heretofore taken. Mr. B. does not claim superiority for himself, but leaves his pictures to the criticisms of a just and intelligent public, who, as well as strangers, are invited to call at the Gallery before going elsewhere, whether they intend sitting or not.

  On a city block teeming with people, in large part due to the hyperbolic P. T. Barnum and those who had learned to emulate his swaggering style of self-promotion, “Mr. B. does not claim superiority” was not likely to draw a crowd.

  Still in his mid-twenties, Brady had reason to be humble, and it was not just his age. As ever in the work of portraiture, the problem was the eyes. Usually this meant the eyes of the photographer’s subject, which could not bear to remain open long enough to achieve a clear exposure. Yet for Brady, the most problematic eyes were his own.