In the 1820s, two families, unknown to each other, worked on farms
in the American wilderness. It seemed unlikely that the families
would ever meet-and yet, they did. The son of one family, the famed
actor John Wilkes Booth, killed the son of the other, President
Abraham Lincoln, in the most significant assassination in American
history. The murder, however, did not come without warning-in fact,
it had been foretold. In the Houses of Their Dead is the first book
of the many thousands written about Lincoln to focus on the
president's fascination with Spiritualism, and to demonstrate how
it linked him, uncannily, to the man who would kill him. Abraham
Lincoln is usually seen as a rational, empirically-minded man, yet
as acclaimed scholar and biographer Terry Alford reveals, he was
also deeply superstitious and drawn to the irrational. Like
millions of other Americans, including the Booths, Lincoln and his
wife, Mary, suffered repeated personal tragedies, and turned for
solace to Spiritualism, a new practice sweeping the nation that
held that the dead were nearby and could be contacted by the
living. Remarkably, the Lincolns and the Booths even used the same
mediums, including Charles Colchester, a specialist in "blood
writing" whom Mary first brought to her husband, and who warned the
president after listening to the ravings of another of his clients,
John Wilkes Booth. Alford's expansive, richly-textured chronicle
follows the two families across the nineteenth century, uncovering
new facts and stories about Abraham and Mary while drawing
indelible portraits of the Booths-from patriarch Julius, a famous
actor in his own right, to brother Edwin, the most talented member
of the family and a man who feared peacock feathers, to their
confidant Adam Badeau, who would become, strangely, the ghostwriter
for President Ulysses S. Grant. At every turn, Alford shows that
despite the progress of the age-the glass hypodermic syringe,
electromagnetic induction, and much more-death remained
ever-present, and thus it was only rational for millions of
Americans, from the president on down, to cling to beliefs that
seem anything but. A novelistic narrative of two exceptional
American families set against the convulsions their times, In the
Houses of Their Dead ultimately leads us to consider how ghost
stories helped shape the nation.
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