A Message From The Ghost In The White House

It’s said his spirit – his ghost – still roams the building in which he once lived.

More than any other before or after him, he may well have been the most tragic occupant of the White House.

Born into poverty himself, Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, was “the illegitimate daughter of Lucy Hanks and a well-bred Virginia farmer or planter.” (Lincoln’s words reported by his close friend and law partner William Herndon) Historian Jon Meacham [And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle. 2022] cites a Lincoln neighbor recalling “that not only was Nancy Hanks an illegitimate child herself but that Nancy was not what she ought to have been…” Herndon wrote, “she was a bold – reckless – daredevil kind of a woman, stepping to the very verge of propriety.” Nancy Hanks Lincoln died on October 5, 1818 at 34 years of age; the nine-year-old, Abraham assisted his father, Thomas, by whittling the wooden pegs that held together the planks of her coffin. Thomas did not tarry long and remarried within a year. 

In the absence of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Thomas and his son were not close. Meacham reports, Abe “preferred to be seen a child of the frontier, not as the child of either of his parents” and “so resented being hired out to neighbors – his father would take his wages – that the experience may have informed his hatred of slavery. ‘I used to be a slave’ – under his father’s autocratic control, Lincoln would remark.”

Herndon wove a romantic image of the twenty-six-year-old Lincoln’s feelings for Ann Rutledge, whose sudden death in 1835 left him devastated and so totally broken that friends feared he would harm himself.

Lincoln met Mary Todd in 1839 and the relationship was on-again off-again before they married on November 4, 1842, when he was thirty-three. Robert Todd Lincoln, the oldest of four children, was born in 1843 and the only child to survive to adulthood. Edward Baker (“Eddie”} died on February 1, 1850 – probably of tuberculosis – and “Willie” succumbed to a fever at the White House on February 20, 1862. Thomas (“Tad”) survived his father’s assassination but died of heart failure in 1871, at age 18. 

His life marked by overwhelming grief and his presidency scarred by 620,000 Civil War deaths, it is easy to imagine sepulchral Lincoln, who died on April 15, 1865 at age 56 - almost ten hours after being shot by assassin John Wilkes Booth, haunting the White House.

According to her press secretary, Liz Carpenter, FLOTUS Lady Bird Johnson believed she experienced Lincoln’s presence one evening while watching a program about his death. Thirtieth president Calvin Coolidge’s wife reported seeing Lincoln’s ghost standing at the window of the Oval Office, hands clasped behind his back, gazing out over the Potomac.

Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands reportedly fainted after encountering the top-hatted and assassinated president at the door of her guestroom during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt admitted feeling his presence – sometimes standing behind her, peering over her shoulder – when she worked late at night.

AuthenticHealers recently toured the White House and, upon leaving, discovered a scrawled note in our coat pocket: “Read the debates with Douglas and change references to slaves to refer to LGBT folks. What I said is as important today as it was then. A. Lincoln” Because he signed his full name on formal Documents and “A. Lincoln” on letters, we’ve assumed it was a personal message and decided to share elements of A. Lincoln’s speeches during those stemwinder oratorical exercises.

Focused on slavery and its extension into the western territories, the Lincoln-Douglas debates were the lead-up to the 1858 Illinois U.S. Senate election. Each candidate spoke for 90 uninterrupted – except for applause – minutes and the candidates – Republican Lincoln and Democrat Stephen Douglas – alternated openings as they move through seven of the nine Illinois congressional districts.  Citing Herndon, Jon Meacham offers a portrait of Lincoln in these debates:

“’He never ranted,’ Herndon recalled, ‘never walked backward and forward on the platform… His manner, his attitude, his dark, yellow face, wrinkled and dry, his oddity of pose, his diffident movements - everything seemed to be against him, but only for a short time.’ His hands behind his back, ‘the back of his left hand in the palm of his right, the thumb and fingers of his right hand clasped around the left arm at the wrist,’ he emphasized his points with his head – ‘throwing it with vim this way and that.’ As Lincoln settled into his speech, he became ever more compelling, and his voice ‘lost in a measure its former acute and shrilling pitch, and mellowed into a more harmonious and pleasant sound.’ At his most animated, ‘to express joy or pleasure, he would raise both hands at an angle of about fifty degrees, the palms upward, as if desirous of embracing the spirit of that which he loved,’ Herndon recalled. ‘If the sentiment was one of detestation -denunciation of slavery, for example - both arms, thrown upward and fists clenched, swept through the air, and he expressed an execration that was truly sublime.’” 

As Lincoln challenged the racist attitudes of his era, we challenge the anti-LGBT bigotry and the racism of today. Lincoln focused on Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence: 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Lincoln argued that all human beings, including Black people, were included in Jefferson’s assertions about innate equality. If we – as individuals and as a nation – believe “all men [and women] are created equal,” “all” must include members of the LGBT community.

On Saturday, August 21, 1858 in Ottawa, Lincoln declared that there is “no reason in the world why the negro [and the LGBT individual] is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Meacham notes:

There were six more debates. Lincoln insisted that Douglas’s arguments for the spread of slavery to the territories foreshadowed a tyranny based not only on race but on rank and wealth - a tyranny that should be a source of fear to white Americans who were not among the slave-owning class. In notes for the campaign, Lincoln wrote: If, by all these means, [Douglas] shall succeed in moulding public sentiment to a perfect accordance with his own… in bringing all tongues to as perfect a silence as his own, as to there being any wrong in slavery [or discrimination against LFBT children and adults] - in bringing all to declare, with him, that they care not whether slavery [or discrimination based on sexual identity or orientation] be voted down or voted up - that if any people want slaves [or to discriminate against LGBT people] they have a right to have them - that negroes [and LGBT individuals] are not men - have no part in the declaration of Independence - that there is no moral question about slavery [or discrimination based on gender or identity or affection] that liberty and slavery [and discrimination] are perfectly consistent - indeed, necessary accompaniments - that for a strong man to declare himself the superior of a weak [or different in his self-identification] one, and thereupon enslave [discriminate against] the weak [other] one, is the very essence of liberty - the most sacred right of self-government - when, I say, public sentiment shall be brought to all this, in the name of heaven, what barrier will be left against slavery [or discrimination and hatred] being made lawful everywhere?… And then, the negro [the LGBT child, adolescent or adult] being doomed, and damned, and forgotten, to everlasting bondage, is the white man [or heterosexual woman or] quite certain that the tyrant demon will not turn upon him too? 

In debate, Lincoln pressed this case again and again and again. In private, he went further, writing: If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B. [or discrimination against him or her because of gender or identity] why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may [discriminate against or] enslave A? You say A. is white [heterosexual], and B. is black [or not conforming to others’ expectations and demands]. It is color [heterosexuality], then; the lighter [or straighter or more macho], having the right to enslave the darker [LGBT]? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin [or more ‘masculine’] than your own. You do not mean color [or sexual identity or whom someone loves] exactly? - You mean the whites [straights] are intellectually the superiors of the blacks [the sexually ‘other’], and, therefore have the right to enslave [discriminate against or even outlaw] them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.

Slavery, Lincoln was saying, need not be forever race-based. What if the aristocracy enriched by human chattel were to enslave white people as well as Black? “Now, when…you have succeeded in dehumanizing the negro,” Lincoln said; “when you have put him down, and made it forever impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul, and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out in darkness like that which broods over the spirits of the damned; are you quite sure the demon which you have roused will not turn and rend you?”

As AuthenticHealers paused to reflect on the missive in our hand and Lincoln’s Ottawa speech, the note itself crumbled to ashes and blew away in a warm-cold breeze. And we are almost certain we heard a raspy, measured voice whisper, “Think about it. Today it is them. Tomorrow it may be your children or your children’s children.”