Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism

6: Invisible World

   Herald pulled no punches during the convention of “Southern Loyalists” in . “Blacks and Whites,” it howled in headline, “Free Lovers, Spiritualists, Fourierites, Women’s Rights Men, Negro Equality Men and Miscegens in Convocation!” Understandably, the thought of southern Republicans clamoring for radical change was hard for any dyspeptic Democrat to stomach, but even more than its stark political message, what begs comment in the headline is its odd congeries of -isms and -ites. With an impressive economy of word, the Herald conjured images of a far-flung subversive cabal, pitting Spiritualists in the middle of a chain of radicals bent on subverting the nation. For many Americans Spiritualism evoked the specters of women’s rights, abolitionism, and racial equality and threatened to alter families and marriages, schools, churches, and prayer, and even diets, for without dietary change, one Spiritualist avowed, “all progress will be to a greater or less degree cramped, warped or stunted.”1 The connections between Spiritualism and reform and the fears they conjointly elicited are hardly new territory for historians, who in the past several years have created a cottage industry of spinning together speaking with the dead and speaking from the dais. Although the cross-fertilization of Spiritualist discourse and radical ideologies of gender has been explored repeatedly by historians, who have concluded that the Spiritual rostrum was a significant, though not unproblematic, space for the propagation of “feminist” views, few have addressed the equally powerful connection between Spiritualism and the antislavery and racial-equality movements, even while acknowledging that a remarkable number of prominent aboliInvisible World  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Invisible World •  tionists were intrigued by or committed to Spiritualism. In  William Lloyd Garrison proclaimed himself a “firm believer in the reality” of Spiritualism , and to varying degrees he was joined in his belief by Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Lydia Maria Child, Gerrit Smith, LaRoy Sunderland, James Freeman Clarke, and others.2 Spiritualists asserted that their reformist influence reached into the halls of Congress, and a few did their best to besiege Washington during the Civil War, not with swords but with pens urging absolute liberty, the vigorous prosecution of the war, immediate emancipation, and full civil rights for former slaves. According to both opponents and proponents of the movement, even the White House was infested with Spiritualists. One critic asserted that Lincoln was a “spiritualist of the abolitionist school” and insisted that “unlike our old fashioned presidents, who were compelled to consult the constitution,” Lincoln descended “in a secret hole of the White House” to consult “a rapping table,” which served as his “law, constitution and gospel.” It was the spirits, the writer claimed, who plunged the nation into war, demanded racial equality, and insisted against all reason that “all must be free—untrammeled and unrestricted.” Spiritualists themselves hardly disagreed, claiming to have held séances on Capitol Hill and to have delivered messages for the president and his wife . . . no doubt from the Lincoln bedroom.3 The cumulative effect of such claims and counterclaims has been to weld Spiritualism firmly onto the structure of social reform, so firmly that one historian insists “it is fair to say that there was not a single early spiritualist who was not also a reformer and abolitionist.” The seams of this weld have been reinforced by the starkly instrumental claims that trance speaking and spirit messages were merely a means—conscious or unconscious—of justifying unpopular political agendas, a convenient way to take up the cudgel of reform while deflecting the blows of opponents.4 As I have suggested, even on the surface these assertions beg further investigation . If a Hare or Ferguson did not exist to muddy the equation of Spiritualism and social radicalism, one might still inquire how spirit messages could possibly be effective in advancing any agenda. Fit to reject selfinterested claims, Spiritualists routinely questioned spirit communications with which they disagreed, while for non-Spiritualists, spirit messages represented nothing less than the toadstools of enthusiasm. More tellingly,  • Invisible World nearly all of the public abolitionist-Spiritualists came to antislavery before adopting Spiritualism, and nearly all had long careers of public speaking without the aid of spirits. Within the antislavery ranks, too, there was strong sentiment that the “the whole matter” of spirit communion was nothing less than “some form or other of human credulity or human imposture ” that might embarrass or cripple the movement. Like many of his peers, Charles Fox Hovey felt that although “the...