The Coming Man

EHB had a few great passions: galvanic medicine, modern spiritualism, the occult, outcast women, and Abraham Lincoln.

Whether her passion for Lincoln was for the man, or for the reforms the Lincoln Administration represented, I can't at this point decide. Few newspaper accounts of her time in California in the 1860s survive, but those that do link her directly to Union propagandizing: to emancipation, to the Boston abolitionists, to John Brown and to Lincoln. Several contemporaries credit her with "delivering California for Lincoln" in 1864 (whatever that means, practically) and she certainly collected for auxiliary soldiers' hospitals at her lectures during the war. Her lecture "The Coming Man; or the Next President of the United States" was, E.J. Dingwall tells us, phenomenally popular, and her funeral oration, after Lincoln's assassination, was as close as EHB came to broad, popular, fame during her lifetime.

For Presidents' Day 2009, EHB's Great Funeral Oration (1865) in photofacsimile and flat text.

(Hardinge mystical marriage theorists, please note the "Miss" on the title page)