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from the ‘loved & lost.’” During several séances, some conducted at the White House, she believed she was able to see Willie. Spiritualism would reach epic proportions during the Civil War, fueled perhaps by the overwhelming casualties. Mediums could offer comfort to the bereaved, assuring them “the spirits of the dead do not pass from this earth, but remain here amongst us unseen.” One contemporary commented that it seemed as if “one heard of nothing but of spirits and of mediums. All tables and other furniture seemed to have become alive.” Some mediums communicated by producing rapping or knocking sounds; others made tables tip and sway; still others channeled voices of the dead. Whatever method they used, one scholar of the movement observes, they “offered tangible evidence that the most refractory barrier on earth, the barrier of death, could be transcended by the power of sympathy.”

Mary’s occasional glimpses of Willie provided only temporary relief. His death had left her “an altered woman,” Keckley observed. “The mere mention of Willie’s name would excite her emotion, and any trifling memento that recalled him would move her to tears.” She was unable to look at his picture. She sent all his toys and clothes away. She refused to enter the guest room in which he died or the Green Room in which he was laid out.

Outwardly, the president appeared to cope with Willie’s death better than his wife. He had important work to engage him every hour of the day. He was surrounded by dozens of officials who needed him to discuss plans, make decisions, and communicate them. Yet, despite his relentless duties, he suffered an excruciating sense of loss. On the Thursday after his son died, and for several Thursdays thereafter, he closed himself off in the Green Room and gave way to his terrible grief. “That blow overwhelmed me,” he told a White House visitor; “it showed me my weakness as I had never felt it before.”

Like Mary, Lincoln longed for Willie’s presence, a longing fulfilled not through mediums but in his active dream life. Three months after Willie’s death, while reading aloud a passage from Shakespeare’s King John in which Constance grieves over the death of her son, Lincoln paused; he turned to a nearby army officer and said: “Did you ever dream of some lost friend, and feel that you were having a sweet communion with him, and yet have a consciousness that it was not a reality?…That is the way I dream of my lost boy Willie.”

While Mary could not tolerate to see physical reminders of Willie, Lincoln cherished mementos of his son. He placed a picture Willie had painted on his mantelpiece so he could show it to visitors and tell stories about his beloved child. One Sunday after church, he invited Browning to the library to show him a scrapbook he had just found in which Willie kept dates of various battles and programs from important events. Maintaining vivid consciousness of his dead child was essential for a man who believed that the dead live on only in the minds of the living. Ten months later, when he wrote young Fanny McCullough shortly after her father’s battle-field death, he closed with the consolation of remembrance. In time, he promised her, “the memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer, and holier sort than you have known before.”

Now, more than ever before, Lincoln was able to identify in a profound and personal way with the sorrows of families who had lost their loved ones in the war.

THE PENINSULA CAMPAIGN

CHAPTER 16

“HE WAS SIMPLY OUT-GENERALED”

TWO DAYS AFTER Willie’s death, General McClellan sent a private note expressing his heartfelt sympathy for the “sad calamity” that had overtaken the Lincoln family. “You have been a kind true friend to me,” the general told the president, “your confidence has upheld me when I should otherwise have felt weak.” Then, referring to the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in the West as “an auspicious commencement” of his own forward campaign in the East, he beseeched Lincoln not to