In the Houses of Their Dead by Terry Alford
Abraham Lincoln’s life narrative is being recounted for the first time ever through the peculiar, often supernatural connections between his family and those of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin.
Two families that were unrelated to one another laboured on farms in the American wilderness in the 1820s. The families’ eventual reunion defied all odds, yet it happened. In the most historic assassination in American history, John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor, the son of one family, assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, the son of the other. But the murder was not unexpected—in fact, it had been predicted.
In the Houses of Their Dead by Terry Alford
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Lincoln has been the subject of countless books, but In the Homes of Their Dead is the first to highlight the president’s interest in spiritualism and show how it uncannily connected him to the man who would murder him. Although Terry Alford, a renowned scholar and biographer, demonstrates, Abraham Lincoln was also intensely superstitious and attracted to the irrational. He is typically thought of as a rational, empirically-minded man. Lincoln and his wife Mary experienced numerous personal tragedies, like millions of other Americans, including the Booths, and turned to Spiritualism, a new practice that was sweeping the nation that maintained that the dead were close by and could be reached by the living, for comfort.
Surprisingly, the Lincolns and the Booths even employed the same techniques. One such practitioner was Charles Colchester, a “blood writer” whom Mary introduced to her husband and who forewarned the president after hearing the ravings of one of his other customers, John Wilkes Booth.
The two families are followed throughout the nineteenth century by Alford’s expansive, richly detailed chronicle, which unearths new information about Abraham and Mary while creating unforgettable portraits of the Booths, from patriarch Julius, a well-known actor in his own right, to brother Edwin, the most gifted family member and someone who feared peacock feathers, to their confidant Adam Badeau, who would oddly become the ghostwriter for President Ulysses S. Grant.
Alford demonstrates how mortality remained ever-present despite the advancements of the age—the glass hypodermic syringe, electromagnetic induction, and much more—so it made sense for millions of Americans, from the president on down, to hold on to ideas that appear to be anything but. In the Homes of Their Dead is a novelistic account of two outstanding American families set against the upheavals of the time, and it eventually prompts us to ponder how ghost stories influenced the development of the country.
