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President Abraham Lincoln signing the Charter of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Apocryphal rendition shows Lincoln with several founding
members of the NAS. Left to right: Benjamin Peirce, Alexander Dallas Bache, Joseph Henry, Louis Agassiz, President Lincoln, Senator Henry
Wilson, Admiral Charles Henry Davis, Benjamin Apthorp Gould. (Painting by Albert Herter, 1924, courtesy of the National Academy of Sciences).

War Department’s bureaucracy after White House or the Soldiers’ Home, to Colchester’s body. When the scientist
fire ravaged the Smithsonian Castle in and Lincoln, always the skeptic, asked asked to examine Colchester’s person,
January 1865. Upon an urgent request Dr. Henry to look into the subject the medium fled.
from Henry, Lincoln saw to it that and figure out how the “communica- Thanks to the Republican Party’s
the building’s roof received critically tion” actually worked. To comply with majority in both houses of the Thirty-
important emergency repairs. the president’s request, Henry invited Seventh Congress (1861-1863), Lincoln
Charles J. Colchester, one of the most
At least once, Lincoln consulted was able to sign into law two bills
Henry on a matter of personal inter- prominent psychics of the day, to that helped join both theoretical and
est. In 1862, Mary Lincoln, distraught display his powers at the Smithsonian. applied science. On May 15, 1862, he
over the death of their son Willie, When Colchester appeared, Henry signed a bill creating the Department of
had turned to spiritualism in an effort quickly determined that the sounds Agriculture as a separate, non-cabinet
to communicate with her lost boy. allegedly emanating from “spirits” federal agency removed from the Patent
A séance had been held at either the actually came from something attached Office. Its first commissioner, the
appropriately named Isaac Newton,
was a self-made man who favored a
…during the first three years scientific approach to agriculture, and
within a short time his department had
of the Civil War, Lincoln, hired a chemist, botanist, entomologist
and statistician. Gabor S. Boritt, in his
because of his natural curiosity Lincoln and the Economics of the American
Dream, has written that in supporting
and the obstinacy of the the newly independent agency, Lincoln
was simply endorsing the traditional
army’s bureaucracy, sometimes Whig “inclination toward intensive,

found himself involved in scientific husbandry,” and Bruce notes
that farmers soon began to appreci-
the development of weapons ate the benefits of applied science. We
can perhaps see the president’s influ-
and ordnance. ence in Commissioner Newton’s first

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