In the Houses of Their Dead explores both the Lincolns’ and the Booths’ enthrallment with spiritualism, the belief that living people can communicate with deceased people’s spirits...Members of both families were shattered time after time by a litany of heartbreaking, often torturous illnesses and deaths, which inspired a desire to communicate with their dead loved ones...Alford seamlessly tells the two families’ stories, starting with the major players’ childhoods and continuing until their deaths—and after...Alford sets the historical stage well, allowing readers to understand the emotional underpinnings of Lincoln’s assassination, which he memorably describes.
... a well-sourced if slight piece of sideways biography that often strains to justify its thesis, but makes a lively study of two wildly disparate clans nonetheless ... even Alford never really roots out the source of the mania that turned a celebrated performer of no particular political will or creed (though he really seemed to hate house cats) into a foaming radical willing not just to die for the Southern cause, but to unseat democracy. Booth’s fanatical conviction that Lincoln had kingly designs on a dictatorship — and that he alone could stop it — somehow managed to pass, it seems, as one more quirk of an artistic temperament ... Alford’s slim, meticulously referenced account, for all its talk of drawing-room conjurers and necromancers, is far less fanciful than that, if hardly dry and academic: a lighter kind of summoning, teased from the footnotes of history.
Alford, having written a definitive biography of Booth, knows the territory. He explores Lincoln’s own religious sensibilities, which ran deep but were unmoored to any particular creed ... This may hold special appeal for fans of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), since it provides factual background for the popular novel.
... entertaining ... Alford, a professor emeritus at Northern Virginia Community College who has also written a biography of John Wilkes Booth, offers no thesis to unify the sundry interactions, coincidences and ironies of his material. In his telling, spiritualism gained enough traction to appeal to two quite different American families — but so what? Would John Wilkes Booth have refrained from murdering Lincoln if the young Fox sisters had kept their toes quiet on that seminal night in rural New York? It’s hard to see why ... In the Houses of Their Dead is nonetheless worth reading for its wealth of Ripley’s Believe It or Not characters and their foibles.
As it happens, Colchester was a drinking buddy of John Wilkes Booth, the murderous actor. Booth and members of his family were spiritualists, and Mr. Alford writes about them and their circle as much as he does about the Lincolns. Long sections of In the Houses of Their Dead feel like an author’s padding to bulk up what otherwise could be a slender volume. Mr. Alford seems to know that most readers will be drawn to his narrative because it involves Lincoln ... This may be true, and there’s a simple reason for it: Ultimately there isn’t a lot to say about Lincoln and the occult. While Lincoln clearly was curious about spiritualism, he did not possess the feckless interest of a naif but rather the concern of a skeptic who wanted to learn more about a movement that was influencing his country and deranging his wife. Many of his biographers already have given this topic the brief attention that it deserves.
In this intriguing if meandering study, historian Alford views the 'common experiences' of the Lincoln and Booth families through the lens of spiritualism...He details how Mary Todd Lincoln became interested in spiritualism after the death of the couple’s second child, Eddie, in 1850...When another son, Willie, died in 1862, Mary’s interest intensified, and the Lincolns sat for about a dozen seances with medium Nettie Colburn in a two-year period at the White House...Elsewhere, Alford links the Booth family’s interest in spiritualism and the occult to patriarch Junius Brutus Booth, a talented but alcoholic and mentally unstable actor given to periodic breakdowns...During the Civil War, the Lincolns and Booths consulted the same mediums, including Englishman Charles Colchester (real name Jackson Sealby), who grew so alarmed by John Wilkes Booth’s threats against the president that he gave Lincoln 'vague but repeated warnings to take care'...Though Alford occasionally wanders far afield from the book’s central theme, he packs the narrative with intriguing if little-known historical figures and strange coincidences...This unusual portrait of two famously intertwined families fascinates.
Historian Alford cuts back and forth among the lives of Abraham and Mary Lincoln and Junius Booth and his sons Edwin and John Wilkes without ignoring lesser-known members of both families...Faithful to his theme, Alford reminds readers that 19th-century America was rife with superstition, and all of his subjects possessed elements of the true believer...Although a skeptic about some aspects of spiritualism, Lincoln attended séances and sometimes praised the mediums, but he did not take them seriously...With a father and three sons on the stage, the Booths were no strangers to torment, mental illness, and personal tragedy, and they indulged in anything that might relieve their misery—although alcohol competed effectively with the occult...In the end, spiritualism contributed little to American politics of the time or even to theatrical history, but it preoccupied a good portion of the population...Nonetheless, even history buffs will find new information in Alford’s sympathetic examination...Niche history but a good read.
