Vox Populi : Spiritualism and George Washington's Postmortem Career

On a summer's night in 1851, a "bright and beautiful" spirit appeared to Judge John Worth Edmonds, cloaked in a gossamer robe "as if it was an atmosphere of a pale-blue . . . transparent and ever moving like living flame."¹ This noble, gray-haired spirit shone forth with a "great firmness, as if he could stand unmoved amid a conflict of worlds," radiating the purity and intellect seen only in the highest spheres of spiritual attainment. Edmonds was moved. At last, he had met the great George Washington.

During the 1850s, Washington seldom called casually from his home beyond the grave, and his visit to Edmonds was far from casual. Still "deeply interested in the welfare of [his] country,"Washington had returned to deliver a jeremiad to his nation, rebuking it for its fall from the high principles of the founding generation. "Bound up as my heart even yet is in the continuance of its freedom;" he wailed, "looking on its institutions as the great fountain of freedom that was yet to flow over the whole earth, I ask myself, 'Where now is the spirit that made us free?' and from dark and dismal depths alone a voice answers, 'Here, buried beneath the load of oppression and selfishness which has grown up and overwhelmed us.'"²

In spirit rooms and lecture halls, parlors and dens, the spirits of the departed returned with regularity in the years saddling the Civil War to chastise or hearten the mortal multitude, to lecture, instruct, and learn. From inauspicious beginnings in Hydesville, New York, in 1848, Spiritualism erupted into the fastest growing religion in America by 1855, drawing from all across the divides of class and section that threatened to dismember the nation, and it drew eclectically, profusely on the currents of popular religion, science, and politics.³ If there was an inertial center to the pendulum of Spiritualist thought, it was simply the belief that the individual survived death and could communicate across the grave, guiding loved ones toward a more perfect self and more perfect world. But the movement of Spiritualist thought was guided by the desire to enact a particular theory of sympathy in human society, predicated on the transparent, mutual penetrability and interconnectivity of all humanity, living and dead. Its most ardent proponents proclaimed that Spiritualism was the only religion verifiable through personal experience with the spirit realm. In such eyes, it was at once modern, liberatory, and rational, an alternative to the divisiveness of Protestant sectarianism; it was testimony to the optimistic creed that humans were "created for progression" and eternal, incremental self-improvement.⁴ It was raw empiricism wedded to revelation, a satisfying creed for the person coping with what Robert Abzug has called the "solvent powers of pluralism and freedom" characteristic of early-nineteenth-century America.⁵

Yet while visits from the dead were common fare during the 1850s, there was something unusual in the return of a Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, or Paine, or any of a host of historical figures from Bacon and Swedenborg to Osceola, Tecumseh, and Jesus.⁶ Unlike the missives delivered by the little-known spirit to the obscure mortal, the words of the late and great came truly from the land of the unknown. Drawn by the attractive force of affective and familial bonds, the typical spirit came from the world of departed relatives and friends to provide private words of solace, encouragement, or admonition. Familiarity—in its fullest sense—was a key element in the dynamic engagement of spirit messenger and mortal recipient.

With Washington, where was the familiarity? Among antebellum Spiritualists, who could claim a personal connection to the president, much less to Osceola? At one level, at least, a visit from Washington stood apart from the great expectations for spirit communication—he took no part in the affective community of family and friend that shepherded the dead to earth—and yet visits from Washington, Franklin, and Paine occupied a peculiar prominence in Spiritualist epistemology and social practice. On those occasions when these figures appeared, their words assumed a distinctly public cast...