Free Spirits
Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era
MARK A. LAUSE
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 C P 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lause, Mark A., author.
Title: Free spirits : spiritualism, Republicanism, and radicalism in the Civil War era / Mark A. Lause.
Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015050880 | ISBN 9780252040306 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780252081750 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: SpiritualismUnited StatesHistory19th century.
| RepublicanismUnited StatesHistory19th century. |
RadicalismUnited StatesHistory19th century.
Classification: LCC bf1242.u6 l38 2016 | DDC 133.90973/09034dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050880
Acknowledgments
Since I bought a used copy of Hardinge's history roughly thirty-five years ago, a considerable number of students of this subjectmostly contemporaries or near contemporarieshave generated an impressive literature. Without their carefully marked trails, I believe it would have been nearly impossible to navigate safely through mountains of often tediously repetitive accounts of conversations with dead people. I am terribly grateful to whoever makes the decisions at Google, the Internet Archives, and similar digitalization projects for access to hundreds of often hefty tomes for free. However, a dedicated group of collectors and scholars functioning as the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals made a sustained and unique effort to make PDFs of newspapers (and much else) available through their site at www.iapsop.com. Earlier I had encountered one of them, John B. Buescher, who had for years shared what he knew freely through the website spirithistory.com, since absorbed into iapsop.com. Although we have never actually met, we have had a long association online, and without his knowledge, insights, and suggestions this study would certainly be far weaker, should it exist at all. At critical points in this study, the Langsam Library of the University of Cincinnati had retained enough staff to sustain an interlibrary loan service that proved essential and expert in running down the occasional odd volume not otherwise available. Over the past two decades I have presented elements of this work in various forms and benefited greatly from the feedback of numerous colleagues, most consistently from Prof. Janine Hartman, with whom I have shared an interest in this subject since graduate school. The staff at the University of Illinois Press has been superb from start to finish, particularly crucial in forcing upon me the kind of constrictions that have focused this study and made it as useful as I hope it will be. To all of these, I am deeply grateful. Most fundamentally, my wife, Kathy, has provided the kind of consistent anchor and patient support without which such projects as this would never have gotten beyond a spirit's whisper.
Prologue
America's 1848
Republican Spirits in Revolt
Almost simultaneously great revolutions have convulsed the four quarters of the globe, and the human race have been strangely moved and quickened in destructive or productive activities. While Europe awake at the shout of trampled millions, suddenly roused to demand freedom, and to hurl down blood-cemented thrones, and dynasties hoary with age and crime, Asia to her center felt a renewing spirit, and the Chinese Empire arose against its Tartar oppressors, filled with a new religion, a new policy, and a promiseon the tongue, at leastof the social and political regeneration of a mighty people.
Present Aspect of the World, Spiritual Telegraph
So it was that American spiritualists located their origins in the tumultuous year of 1848. As republicanism began moving people from Paris to Prague and the visions and voices of Hong Xiuquan inspired what became the Taiping Rebellion, Americans confronted the hard realities that their much-touted system of checks and balances actually sanctioned unaccountable power where it was based on unlimited accumulations of wealth, particularly when it involved the legal ownership of other human beings. July saw the national convention for women's rights at Seneca Falls, and the following month former president Martin Van Buren's Barnburner Democrats hosted a gathering of what became the Free-Soil Party. At both Seneca Falls and Buffalo, stenographers recorded claims to represent the views of the nation's founders, and the reporters tapped those claims across the country on the new telegraph. Not far from there, departed spirits spoke to the world through the Rochester rappings as a spiritual telegraph.
Spiritualists chose to locate the birth of their movement over a long, dark 1848 night in upstate New York, though it had many precedents and complex theological roots. Moreover, it assumed many of its defining characteristics, such as mediumship and the sance, only after 1849. The impact of spiritualism as a movement on the social and political course of the nation in a particularly critical period of American history merits reconjuring.
The Fox Sisters and the Birth of the Movement
The mundane truth is that spiritualism grew from the boredom of two youngsters who started entertaining each other with bodily noises. Fourteen years before, the already sizable Methodist family of John and Margaret Fox of Rochester had added Maggie and her sister Katie three years later. The eldest son, David, farmed in rural Arcadia and told his father that the nearby hamlet of Hydesville needed a blacksmith, so John moved his family to a house there in December 1847. Stories that the house had been haunted for eighteen months and charged with the aura requisite to make it a battery for the working of a telegraph surfaced only much later.
The two youngest girls missed the lights of the reasonably sized town of Rochester. In their boredom, they discovered that popping the joints of their toes on the wooden floors made sounds that resonated through the small cottage, leaving the source largely undetectable. On March 31, 1848, they tried this around their parents and playfully denied that they had made the sounds. To their amusementand perhaps to their horrorthey learned just how credulous adults could be. Convinced that they were listening to the spirit of a dead man, the parents brought in select neighbors for consultation, and the Fox sisters suddenly found community expectations sweeping them irresistibly on to where they knew not.
From the onset of the raps, interested parties other than the girls read their own fears and desires into them. Frightened family members converged on David's farm at Arcadia, and their mother clung to her Bible as a talisman. The first neighbors who crowded in to hear them asked questions that led the noises to identify themselves as the efforts to communicate by the disembodied soul of a murdered peddler. Stories circulated (much later) that human bones and a peddler's pack were found in the cellar walls, but contemporaries needed no such confirmation.
