The Apparitionists

by Peter Manseau

  Hard feelings could wait, however. Gardner was a long way from skylights and velvet curtains now. Between the wagon and the church, bodies had been dragged into a tidy cluster beside a two-wheeled ammunition cart, dead horse still attached, straining at its harness as it swelled in the late-summer heat.

  The big man clambered down from the rumble seat and unpacked his camera. Slightly more maneuverable than the multiocular beast he used in the gallery, the model he brought with him had two lenses. It was designed for the innovative purpose of taking two images intended to be viewed simultaneously. When seen through a handheld stereoscope, they would be given depth by the mind’s own magic, the eyes reconciling the repetition of detail as space through which one might move and explore.

  On the battlefield before him, the best opportunity to take full advantage of the dramatic stereoscopic vista would be to use the white church surrounded by dark trees as the background, like a stage set on which the action before it would unfold. The church door had been removed and holes punched by mortar fire at several places in the south-facing wall. On the image these openings would show as pure black invading the luminescence of the structure, a battle between light and dark setting the tone for all within its orbit.

  Closer to Gardner there were of course the dead themselves. Seven of them, all on their backs as if they had been dragged by their suspenders. Partly obscured by the ammunition cart, the horse was not immediately apparent as nonhuman—all the better to require a good long look past the wagon wheels, the spokes of which would draw the eye toward the center of the frame as if to a target.

  Even for a master of the form like Gardner, the wet plate process had ten steps that could not be rushed. As the dead awaited his further attention, he would clean a fresh plate with a calcium carbonate mixture known as rottenstone, then wipe away its chalky residue with a cloth. Next he would bathe the glass in a succession of potent chemicals: first a blend of grain alcohol, cadmium, ammonium, potassium, and ether, which allowed an image to adhere; then silver nitrate, the vehicle for the necessary chemical reaction that darkened by degrees when exposed to light.

  If he was pleased with how these first steps had been completed, Gardner slid the glass into a coffin-shaped box that protected it from the sun’s rays as he carried it to the camera for the crucial moment of exposure. Then it was back again to the whatsit for treatments to develop the image (ferrous sulfate, potassium nitrate, acetic acid) and fix it to prevent fading (potassium cyanide). That the cyanide was pure poison was just one risk among many of the photographer’s art. The final steps involved both heating the plate over an open flame and coating it with a highly flammable varnish brewed from grain alcohol, lavender oil, and sandarac, the resin of a cypress tree.

  The whatsit would later be compared by some to “a spiritualist’s cabinet on wheels.” This was mainly due to its odd appearance, but there was also something to the nearly mystical nature of the chemical transformations it concealed. That tiny particles of silver could darken in sunlight and then be prevented from following their natural inclination to return to their prior state was curious enough; that this process could be used to preserve the likenesses of men lying dead in a churchyard seemed nearly miraculous.

  After he had developed the images and examined them in the morning light, Gardner saw that they would indeed be powerful stereographs.

  Brady would be pleased with how his assistant had successfully brought even this scene to life. The camera had not captured the stench or heat of the place, nor the flies nor the distant anguish of the not-yet-dead inside the church. But it did record the lines of shade and brightness, and the way battered bodies and a wrecked building could regain something of their wholeness by balancing each other on the fulcrum of an ammunition cart’s wheel. It also recorded the way distant trees and the grass beneath your feet might reveal themselves as part of a larger organism when arranged by a discerning eye.

  Indisputably it was an image of death, but who would argue that it was not also, in its way, beautiful?

  LIKE ROBERT OWEN before him, Gardner hadn’t immediately looked to America as the place to find his utopia. He first set his sights on his hometown. He began to work as a journalist and soon acquired the Glasgow Sentinel, the second most popular newspaper in the city. He saw the paper’s editorial page as his own personal soapbox. From the start, he was less interested in the daily news than in, he said, “enlightening the public” and “guiding right the popular mind of this country.”

  It was in this spirit that he traveled to London to report back for Sentinel subscribers on the first world’s fair, known as the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. For six months in 1851, six million people had the opportunity to see more than one hundred thousand objects ranging from the latest machinery to the fine arts. It was intended as a spectacle of human progress, allowing visitors to examine up close full-scale steam engines and hydraulic presses, luxury carriages and the most advanced firearms, as well as the works of artisans from around the world, with exhibit spaces for goods from nearby Guernsey and Jersey alongside booths for Malta and Ceylon.

  Even before it opened, Karl Marx, who lived in London at the time, denounced the fair as a distraction from impending revolution. “With this exhibition,” he wrote, “the world bourgeoisie erects its pantheon in the new Rome, where it places on show the deities it has fabricated.”

  On the whole, the idealistic Alexander Gardner was similarly dismayed. That such wealth had been spent on a tourist attraction while so many Scots suffered was, he thought, a moral calamity. At a time when society was “half starved by its own toil,” he wrote, it pained him to see “some rolling in luxury” while others were “weary and afoot, dusty, hungry, envying and dangerous.”

  Yet he was not so far removed from his apprenticeship as a jeweler and his scientific education that he did not remain both an artist and a curious soul at heart. He was particularly drawn to the exhibit on “philosophical instruments,” a category that included, according to the fair’s extensive catalog, “instruments relating to Astronomy, Optics, Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Acoustics, Meteorology, etc.” Within this vast field, his eye was drawn to the same works that most impressed the exhibition’s judges. “That photography is yet in its infancy, there can be little doubt,” the judges wrote. “By improvements in the camera and the daily increasing practical knowledge of experimenters, we may expect to behold compositions, embodying a degree of reality otherwise beyond our power of attainment.”

  Of all the nations represented in the photographic exhibit—Britain, France, Austria, and the United States—the Americans surprised the judges with their skill in capturing that most elusive subject, the human face. In portraiture, they declared, “America stands prominently forward.” It alone was notable “for stern development of character; her works, with few exceptions, reject all accessories, present a faithful transcript of the subject, and yield to none in excellence of execution.”

  And of all the Americans whose work stood out in London, one was singled out for special recognition:

  BRADY (United States, No. 137) has exhibited forty-eight daguerreotypes, uncoloured. These are excellent for beauty of execution. The portraits stand forward in bold relief, upon a plain background . . . The portraits of General Taylor, Calhoun, General Cass, and James Perry, are strikingly excellent; but all are so good that selection is almost impossible. The Jury awarded the Prize Medal to Mr. Brady.

  Not long after Gardner’s return from London, the Sentinel began to feature reviews of the booming Glasgow photography scene. “The art of ‘sun picturing’ seems to be making rapid strides,” one review began. “Every time we are called upon to inspect the exhibited specimens of this art we are more struck by its wondrous capabilities.”

  Among its capabilities, Gardner came to see, was the remarkable power to reorganize the world, to create an idealized simulacrum of society in which the troubles he had so long railed against could be bent
to his will. Photography, the Great Exhibition’s catalog had said, “opens a fresh field of philosophical inquiry.” In the judges’ somewhat grandiose opinion, the art “gives to man increased physical knowledge, and may work great changes in his moral destinies.”

  With his otherwise disappointing visit to the Great Exhibition, a new path became clear. Photography was a moral technology, and, at least as far as its practice concerned viewing and reshaping humanity, its most important developments were occurring in America.

  In 1856, at the age of thirty-five, Gardner resolved to rejoin the members of the Clydesdale Company who had gone before him. Along with his mother, his wife, his son, and his newborn daughter, he sailed for the United States. Only upon arriving did he learn that much of the company had succumbed to tuberculosis. The town they had founded was dissolved, its survivors scattering to be absorbed into their new country.

  One dream was dead, but another had been born. Gardner went to New York to seek a job with Mathew Brady. He still believed he could put the chaos of the world in order—if not in newsprint or on a farm in Iowa, then perhaps with lines of silver and sunlight etched on glass.

  GARDNER POURED THE chemical baths back into their respective jars, then packed his camera into the whatsit wagon. Leaving the Dunker Church behind and the dead men where they lay, he rode in search of other scenes to capture. The clatter of metal and glass announced his progress as the cart moved over the battle-pocked landscape.

  His wasn’t the only horse-drawn rig in the vicinity. There were of course the carts of the burial details, weighed down with bodies, then emptied, then filled again, like some gruesome streetcar making its way across a city in the early evening. There were also sightseers, rolling out in fine carriages to see for themselves the carnage that would make unbeatable conversation fodder around Washington’s better tables.

  Along the Hagerstown Pike, where some of the battle’s fiercest fighting had ground on for hours two days before—September 17, 1862—a line of Confederates still lay where they fell. They had been surrounded as Union forces advanced on the road from both directions; their only shelter had been a split-rail fence with vertical posts every six feet connected by five horizontal rails. It would have proved more adequate as a defense if shot and shells had not been raining down from both sides.

  Gardner positioned his camera so that the fence stretched diagonally across the frame, seeming to disappear into the distance. The bodies, bloated in the heat, stiff with rigor mortis, seemed ready to rise and walk away. One man’s arm stretched into the air as if he’d died while reaching for a rope with which to pull himself out of harm’s way.

  Some photographers might have made the dead the only detail worth noting in the picture. Gardner instead directed the camera’s gaze at five sections of posts and split rails. The fence became the perfect focal point for an image ultimately about a nation divided. Though there were bodies scattered around the fields both north and south of the fence, from where Gardner stood it looked as if a destroying angel had stopped short at the split rails, passing over all that lay beyond. The rough timber seemed to confine death to one side of this conflict, and the Confederate soldiers in their mortal disarray left no room for interpretation of which side that was.

  Gardner was now years away from the utopian scheme that had brought him to America, and he accepted that the living could never be permanently organized in such a way that the chaos of the world would seem to have a clear meaning. But at least the dead might be.

  Spirit image of a child beside a photograph of a family member. William Mumler, 1862–1875.

  CHAPTER 13

  Chair and All

  “EVER SINCE I have commenced taking these pictures,” William Mumler said, “I have been constantly dogged forward and back from my camera to my closet by investigators, till I have become sick of the name.”

  In the beginning of his efforts on behalf of Spiritualism in Boston, Mumler resolved that he would devote just two hours each day to the making of images. Demand alone, he later claimed, had determined that it become a full-time occupation. He shut down the engraving and printing shop he had opened just the year before, and thereafter the studio was his sole place of business. He posed portraits all morning and all afternoon. Only darkness prevented him from taking pictures through the night as well.

  In this work he had found his true calling, and had evidently inspired others to follow in his footsteps. Another spirit photographer had been discovered, his work confirmed by no less an authority than Robert Dale Owen—son of the Scottish reformer and a rising politician in his own right, as well as a respected explorer of the paranormal.

  To provide solace to the bereaved and confirmation of the afterlife to the spiritually curious, Mumler thought, was undoubtedly a noble use of his time. But the endless requests he received from those who sought only to injure his reputation were becoming too much to bear.

  Certainly the attentions of J. W. Black had been flattering. After he had passed the tests of that esteemed man of art and science, it seemed he might be allowed into the rarefied fraternity of the upper echelon of Boston’s photographers. That Mumler’s name was becoming known beyond Spiritualist circles was evidence that this was surely the case. Granted, much of the coverage was skeptical, but on balance he could be satisfied that he had defenders of sufficient social standing to bring him a higher class of clientele—men and women of means who would not quibble over prices where visions of eternity were concerned. This undoubtedly would be pleasing to Hannah.

  And how could he not be pleased as well? No sooner did a dismissive article appear in the press than a more informed opinion arose to make his case better than he might himself. As far away as New York, there was even a respected judge and state senator coming to his defense in print.

  “Your article of yesterday in regard to Spiritual Photography professes to solve the mystery, and announced that Appleton’s artist can do the same thing, wherever there is a photograph of the dead person,” the former New York State prison inspector J. W. Edmonds wrote to the Evening Post. “That is not the mystery of this thing,” he insisted. “But it is to take a picture containing a likeness of a person who is dead, and of whom there is no photograph or likeness in existence! This is what the Boston operator professes to do, and the question is, Is that so?”

  It was a natural question; Mumler could not deny it. Since his first image became known, a parade of alleged experts intent on getting to the bottom of the mystery had proposed to march through the studio with notebooks in hand, recording and inspecting every detail. Skeptics now called on him constantly, some openly scornful, others hiding behind obvious subterfuge, all insisting they follow Mumler step by step from camera to darkroom and beyond, each hoping to be the one to slay the dragon of Spiritualism by exposing him as a fraud.

  And not only were nonbelievers out to get him. Among those who should be cheering loudest, his spiritual brothers and sisters who claimed to be open to new discoveries, reticence was rampant—some of which, he no doubt felt, was tinged with jealousy.

  From New York, the nation’s leading Spiritualist, the Seer of Poughkeepsie, Andrew Jackson Davis, had gone so far as to arrange for another photographer to watch Mumler at work. As the editor of the Herald of Progress, which had first publicized the spirit photographer, Davis was now the progenitor of both Mumler’s fame and his scrutiny.

  The photographer Davis sent to shadow Mumler was a man of roughly Mumler’s age, William Guay, who had been born in Germany but had joined the cosmopolitan polyglot community of New Orleans sometime before 1852, when he opened Guay’s Photographic Temple of Art on Poydras Street, not far from the belly of the snake made by the Mississippi River as it moved through the city. When the war came, the photographer had joined the Confederate army, though it cannot be said if he did so willingly. In any case, Guay parted company with the Louisiana State Militia within a year.

  This was not at all unusual at the time. As the New York Times
reported on a group of Confederate infantrymen who had abandoned their posts at the first opportunity early in the war, conscripted immigrants in New Orleans were particularly eager to leave behind a war that never seemed theirs to begin with. “They are all Germans,” the Times reporter noted of the deserters, “and all state that they were picked up by press gangs in New Orleans, gagged, carried to the recruiting offices, and from there in closed wagons to the camp at the racetrack, and forced to take service in the Southern army . . . Their whole company are German, who volunteered under the same circumstances.”

  Whether or not Guay came to his service so dramatically, he seems to have slipped quietly away sometime after the reoccupation of New Orleans by federal troops in April 1862. Still maintaining ownership of his Temple of Art, Guay made his way north even as the war raged. He soon was an unimaginable psychic distance from the fighting, living and working in a city where ghosts appearing on plates of glass was apparently as exciting as things could get. He quickly involved himself in a range of business pursuits that had nothing to do with soldiering, including applying his knowledge of photography in an unexpected way.

  “You can rest assured that I was resolved, if permitted, to allow nothing to slip my utmost scrutiny,” Guay wrote of his initial investigation of the spirit photography mystery. “Having been permitted by Mr. Mumler every facility to investigate, I went through the whole of the operation of selecting, cleaning, preparing, coating, silvering, and putting into the shield the glass upon which Mr. M. proposed that a spirit-form and mine should be imparted—never taking off my eyes, and not allowing Mr. M. to touch the glass until it had gone through the whole of the operation.”