Excerpt from The Talking Dead: An Interview with Abe Lincoln

When the sixteenth President of the United States was assassinated in 1865, Spiritualism was as popular as ever. With so many thousands of Civil War casualties, people looked to mediums for comfort and a chance to make contact with their lost loved ones. Lincoln himself was no stranger to Spiritualism. First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln was a practicing Spiritualist and held séances in the White House. It’s believed the President attended a few of them. They had hoped to hear from their youngest son, Willie, who passed away in 1862. 

Given the Lincolns’ interest, the booming Spiritualism market, and of course, the fact that Lincoln was one of the most high-profile people in America, mediums knew people would want to hear anything they could from him. So they gave it to them—including the following interview. These words from the dead, and many more are now available in The Talking Dead: A Collection of Messages from Beyond the Veil, 1850s-1920s (Curious Publications).

Q.—Do you meet in your new sphere those who were the cause of your death, and if so, with your increased knowledge, do you feel anger or aversion toward them ?

A.—Zones of spiritual life are so overlapped and intermixed that those of us who went out from your sphere through blind and bloody ways are so much aware of the sense barriers which shut off the perception of the boundaries between spirit and flesh, that no vengeful feeling can remain even in individual cases.

Q.—Then you bear such persons no ill-will?

A.—Brothers are we all, even Booths.

Q .—If this is Lincoln who replies, tell us in what light you now view Booth’s act.

A.—John Wilkes Booth was the ordained man whose maddened brain was used to emphasize the divine way to martyrdom for the sake of the work of life’s progress.

Q.—We are then to understand that you are now from your higher point of view content with the manner of your death.

A.—You ask am I content that my life went out as it did. You want to get evidence as to the higher wisdom evolved in my painful going out?

Q.—Yes, we wish you to state your thought in regard to it.

A.—Warfare of all kinds marks life’s progress. Soldiers of life are as surely bound to eternal law as earthly soldiers are bound by military discipline.

Q.—Have you yet personally met John Wilkes Booth?

A.—Soul paths diverge, as sense paths do.