The Psychic Life of Abraham Lincoln

By Susan B. Martinez

Throughout his life, Lincoln consulted oracles; at age 22, he was told by a seer that he would become president of the United States. In his dreams, he foresaw his own sudden death. Trauma and heartbreak opened the psychic door for this president, whose precognitive dreams, evil omens, and trance-like states are carefully documented in this bold and poignant chronicle of tragic beginnings, White House séances, and paranormal eruptions of the Civil War era. Aided by the deathbed memoir of his favorite medium, Lincoln's remarkable psychic experiences comes to life with communications from beyond, ESP, true and false prophecies, and thumbnail sketches of the most influential spiritualists in his orbit. Surveying clairvoyant incidents in Lincoln's life from cradle to grave, the book also examines the Emancipation Proclamation and the unseen powers that moved pen to hand for its historic signing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 10, 2009
• ISBN: 9781601637772

Susan B. Martinez

Susan B. Martinez, Ph.D., is a writer, linguist, teacher, paranormal researcher, and recognized authority on the Oahspe Bible with a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University. The author of Delusions in Science and Spirituality, Time of the Quickening, The Lost History of the Little People and The Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man, she lives in Clayton, Georgia.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Out of the Wilderness

He spoke with a voice of thunder, he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses. The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen… His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America.

—A Muslim chief in a remote corner of the Caucasus, as told to Tolstoy

Prescience seems to run in families; not necessarily as an inherited trait, but through constant exposure to a certain perceptibility or predisposition that shapes and molds the young mind.

Back in old Kentucky, a pioneer, still unmarried, was having a recurrent dream: He followed a wayside path to a strange house, saw its chairs, table, fireside, where a woman was seated, and he saw perfectly her face, eyes, and lips. She was paring an apple. This woman would be his wife. The dream came again and again, haunting him, until he followed the path to the house, and there saw the woman, sitting at the fireside paring an apple; her face, eyes, and lips were as he had so often seen in his dream. Tom Lincoln later told this dream to his son, Abe, and the boy searched his own dreams, especially the recurrent ones, for meaning.¹

Visions, an older Abe Lincoln would say, are not uncommon to me. Nor were they uncommon to that blessed mother of mine…. She often spoke of things that would happen [and] even foretold her early death…just when she would die….²

Born on a Sunday, the same day as Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809), Tom and Nancy Lincoln's son was long-limbed, Buddha-eared, grey-green-eyed, and had an indescribable brick-dust coloring alternately called saffron brown, or, according to a South Carolinian, the dirtiest complexion. It was a doughnut complexion, as Walt Whitman once said. His shoulders were angular and drooping, a metaphor of what would become the proverbial brooding, melancholic Lincoln. He was flat-footed, and his gait had a peculiar swing, according to his cousin Dennis Hanks. And in after years, Abe would hardly outgrow his awkwardness, derided by some—right through his presidency—as uncouth and vulgar. A Springfield lawyer, whose office Lincoln would sometimes frequent to borrow law books, thought him the most uncouth-looking young man he had ever seen. Later, a visitor to Lincoln's White House, who did not succeed in getting her petition satisfied, complained afterward that his stocking was limp and pale, and his old coat could pass as a pen wiper. Another visitor found him in a loose dressing gown and carpet slippers. His tie listed to one side of his collar, his old gray shawl was shabby. His clothes hung on him so unkemptly, Carl Sandburg would later comment that they must have been put on when he was thinking about something else. During the War, an Army doctor once told Lincoln that he resembled a Virginia wood-chopper.³ Others jibed that the president changed his socks once every 10 days, and brushed his hair sometimes. Even Nettie Colburn Maynard, who knew the president and would become a lifelong admirer, had to admit that he impressed her as being indifferent to his apparel, his clothing at times being decidedly seedy-looking.⁴

Eccentric and incongruous, Abraham Lincoln was a curious compound of genius and simplicity; stern, yet tender; melancholy, yet playful; there is moral law, yet there is also compassion.⁵ Steel and velvet, he was known for both gentleness and prowess, and for his swings from garrulous to solemn; for his defense of the underdog, but also biting, sarcastic humor (skewering his adversary) reserved for his rivals. Nonetheless….

There was safety in his atmosphere.

—Frederick Douglass

Although many characterizations of the Railsplitter President depict him as undemonstrative—at times aloof—the impression is easily offset by countless recollections of his tenderness and compassion. He suffered as a young boy when his father slaughtered his pet pig, to whom he had been devoted. He refused to join his schoolmates in torturing a mud-turtle, and afterward wrote a paper arguing against cruelty to animals. His first turkey shoot, at age 8, was also his last: Thomas Lincoln was not home when Abraham spotted some wild turkeys not far from their cabin. His mother gave him permission to use his father's rifle, so he shot and killed one of the big birds, and after that, he never felt inclined to pull the trigger again. A mile from the cabin was a salt lick for deer; he could have easily done the shooting, but no; his father did the shooting.⁶

The story is oddly reminiscent of an old Caintuck (Kentucky) tale that talks about one Mr. Featherton's enchanted rifle called Brown Bess. This fire-iron was the marvel of the Caintuck forest, where Lincoln was born, ’til one day a thin, gray old man—a mysterious stranger—blew upon the rifle, Brown Bess, and forbade Mr. Featherton to use it to shoot a deer. And lo, the streams flowed backward and the shadows pointed the wrong way, and the deer in the brush sped off unharmed (similar to the ghost of Virginia Dare—invulnerable, a silver-white doe that moves fleetingly on moonless nights through the forests of Roanoke Island). Well, anyway, that was the last they saw of that old gray man of melancholy visage. Brown Bess now had become useless, until a famous Indian doctor told Mr. Featherton how to break the charm.

Later, Abraham Lincoln's son, named Thomas after Abraham's father (but called Tad), would save the life of a turkey slated for a White House Christmas feast. The 10-year-old was beside himself when the time came to slaughter the feathered biped named Jack. Taddie burst into a Cabinet meeting and pled for the life of his friend the turkey, which he personally fed and had trained to follow him around. Sobbing uncontrollably (he took after his mother), the boy begged his father, deploring the planned execution as wicked. The boy sobbed that his pet was a good turkey, and he didn't want him to be killed. At length, the indulgent father granted a reprieve.

It is curious that Mary Todd Lincoln, Tad's mother, would boast, as a young girl, that when she grew up she would become the wife of a president. Her grandmother once chided her for being noisy and asked, What on earth do you suppose will become of you if you go on this way? Mary replied, Oh, I will be the wife of a president some day. In her early years, Mary often contended that she was destined to be the wife of some future president.⁷

Abraham had a similar inkling: …riding over the prairie of Illinois with him long years ago…[Ward Hill] Lamon, ‘was told by him repeatedly that he did not recollect the time when he did not believe that he would at some day be President.’⁸

In his teens, his father would hire him out to the Crawfords for farmwork. One day while busy at his labor, Mrs. Crawford asked, What's going to become of you, Abe? He answered, Me? I'm going to be president of the United States.⁹

Later, the young man's bravado would be echoed by a neighbor, Mr. Offut, whom Lincoln vigorously helped build a new store made of logs (the same store in front of which the famous wrestling match with Armstrong—good name for a wrestler—would take place). When Offut's supplies arrived, Lincoln stacked shelves and corners with all manner of goods, working so industriously that Offut declared: He knows more than any man in the United States…. Someday he will be president…. He can outrun, outlift, outwrestle, and throw down any man in Sangamon County.¹⁰

Lincoln was 25 years old.

Earlier, around the time Abraham Lincoln reached his majority, there began in America a sweeping groundswell of religious bodies and experimental sects, many with a distinctly Utopian or socialist flavor. There were Quakers and Shakers, Dunkers and Moravians, Brook Farmers and Adventists, Rappites and Perfectionists, Fourierists and Mormons, Universalists, Methodist and Baptist revivals, Millenialists, Hopedale and Nashoba, Bethel and Aurora, Amana and Zoar. The Amanas were spiritual adventurers, 800 German Pietists, who settled in Iowa on 25,000 lush acres, establishing seven villages upon the communal pattern. Bleib treu was their motto: Stay true. Zoar Village was also settled by German separatists and pacifists on the Tuscarawas in Ohio, their society also communistic. As for the northwest (today's Midwest), another communitarian group was founded by Robert Owen, the Father of English Socialism, who came down the Ohio and settled on the Wabash. His place, called New Harmony, helped give the territory, Lincoln's turf, a name for visionary and egalitarian schemes, a renaissance that in the 1830s and 1840s was animated by the hope of applying public lands to social amelioration.

Robert Owen's ox teams and pack horses came through Lincoln's Gentryville, Indiana, carrying people on their way to this new place on the Wabash River. After leaving Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln had been raised on Pigeon Creek, near Gentryville, which was less than 50 miles from New Harmony in Posey County. Owen's son, Robert Dale Owen, was 25 years old when he and his father sailed to America and went out West for their social experiment (which would fail within three years). Abraham and Robert Dale met on the Wabash at the port of New Harmony; Abe was ferrying a boat on the Ohio River, taking a flatbed down the Ohio and Mississippi, peddling cargoes to planters.

Owen Sr., a Welshman, was a man of wealth and distinction; he had made a speech before Congress explaining the vision of New Harmony—no fighting, cheating, or exploitation, and equal sharing. As Carl Sandburg recounts the impressive migration, ox wagons and pack horses kept coming past the Gentryville crossroads, the scheme lighting up Abe Lincoln's heart. And all those books! The schooling cost about $100 a year, and Abe could have worked for his board. But Tom Lincoln had other plans for his son. He sneered at his son's legemania and lust for eddication, hid his books, and even threw some of them away. Abraham was virtually in bondage to his father who preferred to hire him out for wages. But the son deplored the tedium of farm work, and had other plans than delving, grubbing, and shucking corn.

…And must I always swing the flail, and help to fill the milking pail?

I wish to go away to school;

I do not wish to be a fool!

—verses by the Quaker poet/abolitionist

John Greenleaf Whittier,

who also started out a farm-bound boy

If Abe don't fool away all his time on his books, he may make something yet.

—Thomas Lincoln

Lincoln's melancholy would later be attributed in part to his father's cold and inhuman treatment of him.¹¹ Both parents, in fact, punished their son corporally. There is some speculation that Lincoln inherited his mother's sadness and sensitivity, and his father's moods, strange spells, and fits of solitude. But Abraham was unstoppable: Good boys who to their books apply / Will all be great men by and by, he once wrote. He called himself a learner, and others agreed that he could pump a man dry on any subject he was interested in.

And he remained a learner. Wined and dined during his long ride to Washington as president-elect in 1861, Lincoln was served oysters on the half-shell (probably for the first time). He took it in stride, good-naturedly learning the art of oyster-eating. And he would never stop learning. In January 1865, he told Judge Davis that he had just learned the correct spelling of m-a-i-n-t-e-n-a-n-c-e, which he carefully spelled out for his old crony in the middle of a long and arduous White House handshaking ordeal. Even Horace Greeley would dub President Lincoln "a growing