The Apparitionists

by Peter Manseau

  Since adolescence he had experienced trouble with his vision. He had no difficulty arranging scenes for photographs in his studio or outside in the sunshine. Yet the precision of sight necessary to focus a lens or make adjustments to light and shadow was gradually leaving him. His round, steel-rimmed spectacles helped only so much; he remained limited by the malady that had so darkened his earliest days that he once remembered of his childhood, “I felt a craving for light.”

  In order to compete with the likes of Gurney, Brady had to think in bigger terms than the competition. He considered what the public wanted when it sought a photograph. In a way, it was something not unlike what he had provided to Eliza Farnham and her phrenologist colleagues: a rendering of inner lives written with exterior details. While a convict might be pictured in such a way that those who chose to do so could read any personal or psychological failing into the contours of his face, those with means and time enough to acquire their own portrait, or that of a person they admired, often had a similar desire: to see virtue reflected in the slope of a nose, the jut of a chin.

  Every portrait studio worthy of the name featured not just a posing salon where clients might face the camera, but an elegant waiting room with dozens and sometimes hundreds of portraits on display. Brady began to remake his humble Daguerrian Miniature Gallery into the much-grander-sounding National Gallery of Daguerreotypes.

  In his advertisements, the humility of a photographer going nearly blind fell away, replaced by a voice that proposed this was a site of significance to the entire country. He boasted that his walls now were home to “The President and Cabinet . . . Members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives, Justices of the Supreme Court at Washington, and many other eminent persons.” He continued, “The Proprietor, being much of his time in Washington, has the advantage of adding to these portraits many others that may interest the public.”

  Having cut his photographic teeth on criminals and lunatics, Brady took to politicians right away. In 1850, he published twenty-four images in a lithographic series that would allow his customers to display the heroes of the still young nation on their own walls: “This collection embraces portraits of the most distinguished men of this country,” he claimed—and the claim had the curious effect of leading many who believed they should be counted among the “most distinguished” to seek out his services.

  By the end of the decade, he had eclipsed even Gurney—almost literally so. He greatly expanded the studio to take up much of the block across from the American Museum, making “Brady of Broadway” a natural stop for thousands of tourists. With new sky-facing windows installed above the photographic rooms, he seemed also to harness all available light. “This establishment is one of the most extensive in the world,” he wrote. “Its facilities for the production of portraits by the Daguerrean art unrivalled. It now occupies two large buildings, 205 and 207 Broadway. The operating department is arranged in the most scientific manner, and directed by persons of acknowledged skill in the profession. Strangers and citizens will be interested and pleased by devoting an hour to the inspection of Brady’s National Gallery.”

  If the inventor of the telegraph planted the seed of the portrait photograph industry in America, Mathew Brady cultivated it, harvested it, and brought it to market. Exploiting the beginnings of celebrity culture and the possibilities it promised to those able to come close to the famous, Brady offered “strangers and citizens” the opportunity to sit before the very camera where the great men of the nation had sat, to be seen as they were seen. To sit before the camera, Brady realized, was to imagine oneself, if only for a few moments, the very center of the world’s attention. The hub of the universe in the flesh.

  It was also to dabble in the transformative magic of the art, which even then was beginning—a decade before Mumler would summon ghosts to his plates—to experiment with the innate sorcery of crafting images of light. It was not uncommon at the time to see advertisements for “composite photography,” which involved looking at two photographs side by side in a viewer called a stereograph. With each eye focused on a different image, the mind would attempt to make sense of them by melding their forms into one. “I have taken a gentleman’s picture on one plate and a lady’s on the other, and by placing them in the stereoscope they were blended together, producing the most astonishing effect,” one Philadelphia photographer wrote. “The resulting picture is not a true likeness of the one or the other, yet possesses the most prominent features of each, making a picture wonderfully like one of their children. All true lovers,” he confidently predicted, “by having their daguerreotypes side by side in the stereoscope, will possess a perfect infantometer, and be enabled to anticipate the precise style of beauty which is to rise up and gladden their double blessedness.”

  The space between what was real and what was imagined was the art form’s natural terrain, and Brady realized this better than anyone. Perhaps inevitably, he became the photographer of choice for P. T. Barnum, whose gravity and celebrity pulled the young photographer into still higher orbit. For the most part, Brady’s rise helped other nearby studios, permanently establishing Broadway as the single best place in the country to visit for those hoping to take part in the marvel of photography.

  Gurney did not see it this way, however. Brady was not a threat to his livelihood, but he was to his reputation, previously unchallenged, as the nation’s photographer.

  After the election of Franklin Pierce to the White House in 1852, Brady landed the lucrative portrait of the new president. Brady had also made a daguerreotype of Pierce’s vice president William R. King, but King would die less than a month after taking office. Annoyed that he had not had the opportunity to make an image of the new president himself, and perhaps taking some small comfort in the likelihood that Brady had printed hundreds of vice presidential portraits that would never sell, Gurney placed a clever advertisement in the papers that he imagined would remind readers who was the preeminent photographer in the country.

  “Poetry is in decline but the muse still sings of Daguerreotypes,” he wrote, then continued:

  General Pierce is a popular person at present.

  United almost were the Yankees for Frank

  Rather new for this people—for him no less pleasant;

  Now, in favors and fame, who is second in rank?

  Every eye turns toward you, the greatest artist renowned

  Your daguerreotype runs everything off the ground.

  With no vice president, who was second to the commander in chief in terms of prestige? With no surplus of humility, Gurney’s acrostic asserted that it was he himself. In an era in which classified ads filled dozens of columns in every paper with monotonous litanies of nearly indistinguishable advertisements for goods sold, services rendered, and situations sought, Gurney made playful use of their potential, showing the creative spark that had for so long secured his place at the top of his profession.

  He had not recognized, however, that though Brady was a fine photographer, the younger man had become a truly tireless competitor, a man who would not be outdone. Gurney’s use of poetry to spell his name had taken up six lines in the daily papers. By the time the next presidential contest began, Brady had begun placing ads that ran beyond a hundred lines of type, spelling out his name with hundreds of words in advertisements that came as close as one could get in nineteenth-century newsprint to putting his name in neon lights.

  Brady was quick to align himself with the latest advances in photographic technology, leaving it to his potential clients to determine that his rivals were wedded to older ways of making images. If Gurney wanted to boast that his “daguerreotype runs everything off the ground,” Brady was perfectly willing to let him. Only a decade after the miraculous discovery had become known in the United States, the daguerreotype was already becoming passé, replaced by ever more complex techniques.

  Adding injury to the insult of being supplanted as the preeminent photographer for the great and distingu
ished, during the years of Brady’s rise with these new methods, Gurney was laid low by an affliction associated with the now dated art. The same year he claimed that his skill with Daguerre’s process made him “the greatest artist renowned,” he came down with mercury poisoning, an occupational hazard of the days when developing plates involved the use of mercury fumes. In further contrast to Gurney, the image Brady portrayed—despite the limitations of his own eye affliction—was of vigor and the health of better days ahead.

  By the presidential campaign of 1860, there was no question of whom the ambitious young senator from Illinois would choose to take his picture on the day of his first major address in New York, at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly known as the Cooper Institute.

  When Abraham Lincoln visited Brady of Broadway on February 27, 1860, the latter’s reputation was well established, the former’s only beginning its ascent. The photographer approached this portrait as he had so many others before: with an understanding of how a single instant captured on glass might come to represent a man’s very soul.

  With his gaunt face bobbling high above his shoulders and his hair somewhat wild from the winter winds that blew like a gale in the intersection of Broadway and Fulton, Lincoln did not look much like a statesman as he stood in Brady’s posing room. The photographer drew up Lincoln’s collar to shorten the appearance of his neck, and determined that he could put his artists to work taming Lincoln’s hair after the image had been developed. They also might smooth the crags in his face—whatever might be done to make him appear more presidential. As a final touch, Brady placed Lincoln’s hand on a book, as if the senator were already taking the oath of office.

  When an image was needed to illustrate press accounts of Lincoln’s successful address, an engraving made from Brady’s photograph ran in newspapers across the country. It was the first most Americans had seen of the man. Later that year, after it became clear he would rise to the White House and all that lay beyond, Lincoln declared, “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me president.”

  This assessment no doubt had something to do with Brady’s winning the chance to photograph the new first lady soon after. Mary Todd Lincoln visited Brady’s studio in March of 1861. Famously concerned about her appearance in photographs, Mrs. Lincoln thought she looked too stern and matronly, and that her hands were too big. As he had with her husband, Brady posed his nervous subject, finding the best possible angle with which to display her profile. He then carefully arranged her hands to seem more dainty, diminished by a white kerchief he placed beneath her woven fingers. After developing the image, he instructed his artists to paint over the back of her dress, removing several inches from her waistline.

  Half fantasy, half reality, it was one of her favorite photographs of herself.

  PART II

  Philosophical Instruments

  The medium Fannie Conant with a spirit image of her brother. William Mumler, 1862–1875.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Message Department

  LESS THAN A MONTH after his initial discoveries, William Mumler was the talk of Boston, an object of fascination for the living as well as the dead. Among the spirits who gathered at the offices of the Spiritualist newspaper on Washington Street, only the war was a more heated topic of conversation.

  On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays each week, a meeting room at the headquarters of the Banner of Light became crowded with the sitters of Fannie Conant’s “circle,” a gathering of Spiritualists who acted not only as an audience for the medium’s channeling of spirits, but, it was said, as a “battery” providing the energy needed to maintain the connection between this world and the next.

  In the beginning, the Banner’s cofounder William Berry had proved a sufficient battery to release Mrs. Conant’s gifts. They would sit together for hours, Fannie in a trance state, William enraptured by her spiritual powers. “Mr. Berry conceived the idea that the seances must be held strictly in private,” her spirit-written autobiography later recalled, “only himself and Mrs. C being at the table.” Acting as both battery and recorder, Berry raced to write down every word spoken.

  On certain occasions, she became “so thoroughly depleted of vital force by reason of her ministrations” that the only way in which communications could be given through her was to allow her to fall into a deep slumber and then place a pen in her hand. The spirits would then write the messages they wished to convey, with Berry at Fannie’s side, “moving the paper as fast as it became necessary.”

  Though this collaboration produced remarkable results in Berry’s estimation, his partner Luther Colby soon suggested it was their responsibility to share Fannie’s gifts with others who might benefit. Moreover, he argued, her powers as a medium had become so great that she needed a bigger battery.

  Berry eventually agreed, but insisted he should remain intimately involved in the expanded circles. Fannie found his ongoing attentions a mixed blessing, however. She considered it his job to maintain a meditative calm in the increasingly crowded séance room, the better to keep open a channel of communication to the vasty deep. “At first the manifestations of spirit intelligence, and the management of the circles for the same, were not as quietly ordered, or systematically arranged as afterward,” she later said. “It required practice for Mr. Berry and his unseen coadjutors to perceive the proper conditions to be observed on either end of the telegraphic wires. Mr. Berry, on his part, would often allow persons to enter the room, or retire, while the seance was going on, thus submitting the medium to the severest shocks, and almost unfitting her to continue.”

  Soon the room became so full it was difficult for eager Spiritualists to pass through without bumping into each other. If a stray hand should jostle Fannie’s arm while she was summoning a spirit, “the nicely adjusted magnetic surroundings were so thoroughly disturbed that no further manifestations could be obtained.” Sensing Fannie’s displeasure, Berry made sure the doors closed at three o’clock sharp to avoid undue disturbances. On more than one occasion, he was forced to find a bigger room.

  The biggest room of all proved to be the pages of the Banner of Light. While at most only a few daozen could attend even the largest séance circle, thousands would read the medium’s messages in written form. Berry had dutifully copied hundreds by then, and began publishing them in a dedicated section of the paper known as the Message Department.

  The otherworldly communications shared by Mrs. Conant were soon the Banner of Light’s most popular feature. She became the paper’s star, and William Berry her most ferocious defender. “The great unpopularity of Spiritualism in its opening days,” Fannie Conant’s biography recalled, “caused much trouble to be made by the relatives of those communicating through Mrs. Conant, concerning the publication of their messages to the world. Those who felt specially aggrieved, frequently called in ruffled mood upon Mr. Berry, but gained no comfort from that gentleman, as he assured them, that whatever came as a message through the medium which was within the bounds of reason, he should most certainly publish.”

  BY THE TIME William Mumler appeared on the Boston Spiritualist scene, the Banner of Light’s circles had gone on in much the same fashion for five years. The only change was that Fannie Conant had begun to host them alone.

  With the start of the Civil War, William Berry had enlisted as a sergeant in the 1st Company of the Massachusetts Sharpshooters. Part of a movement among Spiritualists to show their loyalty to the Union, many northerners who shared his beliefs had become concerned that Confederate mediums were supplying otherworldly information to Robert E. Lee and other rebel leaders. As the Boston Daily Evening Transcript reported, “The Spiritualists, or at least some of them, think that the rebels get their intelligence of the designs of the Union Generals through mediums, who are able to get into their thoughts and swindle them out of their plans.”

  At the age of thirty-six, Berry was a bit old to muster into service but driven to provide the Union with some Spiritualist m
uscle of its own. Though his civilian work had been largely limited to journalism, he headed for the front lines and quickly proved his worth at battles including Ball’s Bluff, the Siege of Yorktown, and Savage’s Station. He was promoted to first lieutenant within six months, while the Banner séance circle tried to ensure that the spirits of the dead would watch over him.

  The war came up often in the circle. Men killed in battle frequently held court, and other spirits offered their ethereal opinions on the meaning of conflict and the good that might come of it.

  “I’ve got somebody I want to speak to, living,” Fannie Conant said in the voice of a young boy. His words came quietly, a result of the lung fever that, the medium explained, had caused his death. “My father was killed at the battle of South Mountain. I’ve been away most a year. I was eight years old, and my name was John Dixon. My father’s name was Nathan. My mother’s got Jenny with her, and she’s most tired. She don’t know how to live; she’s so tired of working. And my father couldn’t come to speak, and said I must. He’s sober here; he isn’t never drunk here. He’ll talk to my mother, if she’ll let him. I don’t like to come here.”

  “You mustn’t be afraid to come to this place,” Mrs. Conant said in her own voice.

  “I ain’t afraid but I don’t like to come.”

  “You ought to be willing to come for your mother’s sake.”

  “She’s crying all the time,” the boy’s voice said.

  “You will do her much good by coming here today, I dare say.”

  Such communications usually included references to living readers of the Banner, who then would alert the family of the visiting spirits that contact had been made. On many occasions, Conant spoke not only with her own voice and that of the recently deceased, but in the name of a spirit who identified himself as Captain Gibbs, an old salt of a seafaring man who may or may not have died as a pirate. So taken was she with this persona that when traveling by water she would argue with steamship skippers about weather and the tides, insisting her nautical knowledge had come from the great beyond. Fallen soldiers preferred to talk to the spirit of Gibbs through the medium, apparently more at ease speaking with a man of military rank than to a woman.