February 20, 1862
Willie Lincoln died in the White House on February 20, 1862, eleven years old, after weeks of what was then called “bilious fever” — typhoid, in modern terms. He was the Lincolns’ third son and, by every account from those who knew the family, Mary Todd Lincoln’s favorite. His death came at a moment when the Civil War was less than a year old, the Union’s prospects were genuinely uncertain, and the President of the United States was, in addition to everything else, a grieving father.
Mary Todd Lincoln did not attend her son’s funeral. She spent weeks unable to leave her bed, and by the accounts of those around her, never fully recovered. It was in this state — and at the urging of friends, including her seamstress and confidante Elizabeth Keckley — that she began seeking out Spiritualist mediums, people who claimed the ability to communicate with the dead.
This was not, in 1862, an unusual thing for a grieving person to do. American Spiritualism had been a significant cultural movement since the late 1840s, when the Fox sisters in upstate New York reported communicating with spirits through a system of rapping sounds. By the 1860s, Spiritualism had millions of adherents across the country, cutting across class lines, and the Civil War — which produced an almost incomprehensible volume of sudden, violent, often unconfirmed death — created enormous demand for anything that promised contact with the dead. Families with sons missing in action, families who had received only a telegram where a body should have been, turned to mediums in significant numbers. Mary Todd Lincoln’s grief was personal. The context she was grieving within was, for many American families at the time, shared.
The Red Room
What followed, between roughly 1862 and 1865, was a series of séances held at the White House — historians differ on the exact count, with estimates ranging from four to as many as eight, based on the work of Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald and others working from surviving correspondence and diary entries. Most were held in the Red Room. The medium most consistently associated with these sessions was a young woman named Nettie Colburn (later Nettie Colburn Maynard), who Mary Todd Lincoln had been introduced to through Spiritualist circles in Washington.
The most frequently cited account places one such séance in December 1862, with Colburn — by her own later account, in trance — addressing the President directly. According to Colburn’s 1891 memoir (published nearly thirty years after the events it describes, a gap worth keeping in mind), the spirits speaking through her urged Lincoln toward a course of action regarding the Emancipation Proclamation, which Lincoln had already drafted and was preparing to issue on January 1, 1863.
It’s worth being precise about what this account does and doesn’t establish. Colburn’s memoir was written decades later, by someone whose livelihood depended on her credibility as a medium, describing a private encounter with no other surviving firsthand account from Lincoln’s side. Lincoln had already decided on the Emancipation Proclamation’s substance and timing well before December 1862 — the preliminary proclamation had been issued in September. Whatever happened in that room, it cannot reasonably be credited with determining a decision that the documentary record shows Lincoln had already made.
What the episode does establish, regardless of what was said in the room, is that the sitting happened — that the President of the United States, in the middle of the Civil War, sat for a session with a Spiritualist medium his wife had brought into the White House.
Why Lincoln Was There
The most consistent account of Lincoln’s own attitude — from people who knew him, and from historians who have examined the record since — is that Lincoln attended these sessions out of a combination of curiosity and concern for his wife, not belief in the practice itself.
This framing matters because it describes a dynamic that’s recognizable well beyond Spiritualism specifically: a person skeptical of (or indifferent to) a practice nonetheless participating in it, attending closely, partly to understand what was happening to someone they cared about, and partly — in Lincoln’s specific case — to be present enough to notice if the people around his grieving wife were taking advantage of her.
This concern wasn’t paranoid. The historical record around Mary Todd Lincoln’s Spiritualist circle includes several figures generally regarded by historians, including those sympathetic to her, as frauds — Henry Wikoff and a man calling himself “Lord” Charles Colchester among them. One account from January 1863 has Mary Todd Lincoln describing a visit to a medium named Mrs. Laurie in Georgetown, who had made “wonderful revelations” to her about Willie — the kind of vague, emotionally loaded language that, per the cognitive mechanisms discussed elsewhere in this publication, is exactly what a person desperate for any connection to a dead child would be primed to receive as meaningful.
The most theatrical episode involved the Lauries’ daughter, a medium known as Mrs. Belle Miller, at a session that reportedly included a piano appearing to move and lift off the ground with several adult men — Lincoln among them, by some accounts — seated on top of it. What actually produced this effect is not recorded in any way that would satisfy a modern investigator. What is recorded is that the President of the United States was, by multiple accounts, in the room when it happened.
What Lincoln Believed, As Far As Anyone Can Tell
Lincoln’s own religious and metaphysical views are notoriously difficult to pin down, and biographers have argued about them for over a century. He was not a member of any church. His public rhetoric — particularly in his second inaugural address, delivered weeks before his assassination — invokes providence and divine purpose in ways that go well beyond conventional political language of the time, suggesting a man who had thought seriously about questions of fate, judgment, and meaning, whatever specific theological conclusions he had or hadn’t reached.
What there isn’t strong evidence for is Lincoln treating Spiritualist séances as a source of guidance in the way Mary did. The pattern that emerges from the available accounts is closer to: a man under enormous strain, managing a war with uncertain outcome, whose wife had found something that gave her relief from grief that nothing else had — and who chose not to forbid it, attended some of it, kept a watchful eye on the people involved, and continued making decisions through the ordinary channels of his office regardless of what happened in the Red Room.
This is a less dramatic story than “the President consulted spirits about the Emancipation Proclamation,” which is the version that circulates most widely. It’s also, on the available evidence, closer to what actually happened.
After the White House
Mary Todd Lincoln’s involvement with Spiritualism didn’t end with her husband’s death — if anything, it deepened. After Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, and again after the death of their son Tad in 1871, Mary traveled to consult mediums in New York and Boston, reporting experiences of seeing both Willie’s and Lincoln’s spirits during sessions. She eventually visited William Mumler, a “spirit photographer” who had already been investigated and tried — though acquitted — for fraud, and who produced for her a photograph showing a translucent figure resembling Lincoln standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders. Mary continued seeing mediums even after Mumler’s fraudulent methods had been publicly exposed in his trial — a detail biographers have generally read as evidence of how completely her grief had outpaced her capacity for skepticism on this specific subject, even as she remained sharp and skeptical in other areas of her life.
This trajectory — escalating engagement with Spiritualist practice across repeated, compounding losses (Eddie in 1850, Willie in 1862, Abraham in 1865, Tad in 1871) — is consistent with what’s now understood about grief and belief more broadly. The pull toward practices that promise continued connection with the dead doesn’t typically weaken with repeated disappointment; if anything, accumulated loss increases the psychological stakes of finding something, anything, that offers relief, regardless of what happened with the last attempt.
The Question Underneath the Story
The Lincoln White House séances get retold, often, as either a curiosity (did you know the Lincolns held séances?) or as something more pointed (did spirits influence the Emancipation Proclamation?). Neither framing is quite the right question.
The more useful question is the one Lincoln himself seems to have been navigating, mostly without comment: what do you do when someone you love finds comfort in something you don’t believe, during a period of loss severe enough that almost nothing else is reaching them? Lincoln’s answer — sit in the room, watch carefully, don’t forbid it, don’t endorse it, keep doing your actual job — isn’t a position on Spiritualism. It’s a position on grief, and on the people grieving around you.
The war went on. The Proclamation had already been written. And in the Red Room, a young medium continued telling a President’s wife that her son was nearby.