He often cheated the fools, as he could easily do
I do not believe it is my fate to die in this way
It was the sound that impressed Lincoln the most. Strange, inexplicable noises emanating in different parts of the room. The President wasn’t a believer, but it was a phenomenon that piqued a curious mind.
Charles J. Colchester was one in a long parade of mediums that visited the White House in wake of Willie’s death. The third son of Abraham and Mary Todd fell ill in early 1862 and died before the end of February. The President’s former law partner in Springfield, William Herndon, had referred to Willie and younger brother Tad as “notorious hellions,” but the boy’s death from typhoid fever had a profound and lasting impact on the Lincolns.
"My poor boy,” the President said. “He was too good for this Earth.” After the funeral, the President locked himself in a room to cry in solitude, tying a black ribbon around his top hat when time came to return his attention to the War. Mary Todd, meanwhile, remained in bed. She finally emerged after three weeks, wearing all black and seeking refuge in the spiritual advisors who paraded through the White House following young Willie’s death.
A believer, the First Lady found hope in their proclamations. “He lives,” she told her sister, Emilie Todd Helm. “He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of my bed with the same sweet, adorable smile he has always had.”
Regarded as a leading spiritualist of the day, Charles J. Colchester was not above pulling a fast one over on the devoted. He happily admitted to Warren Chase, a pioneer and former member of Congress that, “he often cheated the fools, as he could easily do it.” Asked by friend whether he’d like another drink, Colchester psychically communed with a nearby lamppost and answered in the affirmative. It was clearly a goof – the man needed required no outside council to determine that more booze was in his immediate future.
Perpetually hard up for a buck, Colchester found his way into the good graces of the First Lady, even as her husband remained skeptical. The President tasked Joseph Henry, an employee of the Smithsonian Institute, with investigating the medium’s legitimacy. The initial report came up empty, though a chance encounter with a salesman would later uncover that the Colchester wore a noisemaker on his arm that generated the sounds that so intrigued Lincoln.
But Colchester proved prophetic, nonetheless.
After an associate warned the President to be more careful in the waning days of the Civil War, Lincoln answered, nonchalantly, that “Colchester has been telling me that.” The medium was one of in a long line of concerned observers to suggest he beef up security, though, as he told one, “I do not believe it is my fate to die in this way."
Once again, there was more to Colchester’s premonition than he led on. The medium had befriended a prominent actor, who had himself grown fascinated with the increasingly popular field of spiritualism following the 1863 death of his sister-in-law. The two were fast friends, drinking buddies and, according to John Wilkes Booth, associates. Colchester frequently visited Booth at the National Hotel, half-a-dozen blocks away from Ford’s Theater, as a kidnapping plot morphed into assassination plans.
At 10:15 PM, the night of April 14th, Booth followed through. As fellow actor Harry Hawk delivered a line that sent the crowd into uproarious laughter, Booth shot the President from behind with a derringer. He fled on foot, after stabbing military officer Henry Rathbone with a dagger. Much of the audience assumed the commotion was part of the show.
Investigating officer Henry H. Wells visited the National Hotel in hopes of finding more information about the missing assassin. A clerk informed the military man that the actor had befriended the medium, who by then had also fled town.
In August, Colchester found himself standing trial in Buffalo, New York, for a case of “jugglery” (sleight of hand) without a license. In spite of the prosecution’s insistence to the contrary, the trial quickly became an indictment of the spiritualist phenomenon. The medium pled “not guilty,” claiming to be a member of the clergy.
“Who will not rejoice,” The New York Times wrote of the case, “if the result of such verdicts be to make the profession of ‘spiritual medium’ as unprofitable as it is disreputable, and to destroy a trade which thrives best where human nature is the weakest, and adds nothing to the material, mental or moral wealth of the community in which it is tolerated?”
Colchester was found guilty and required to pay a $40 fine, along with $473 in court costs.
Sources:
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth by Terry Alford
Curious Trial at Buffalo The United States vs. C.J. Colchester. https://www.nytimes.com/1865/08/27/archives/spiritualism-jugglery-curious-trial-at-buffalo-the-united-states-vs.html
The First Amendment, the Rise of Spiritualism, and State Prohibition and Regulation of the Crafty Sciences, 1848-1944 https://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1406&context=faculty_scholarship