Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era by Mark A. Lause (review)

Free Spirits introduces us to American spiritualism by way of Maggie and Katie Fox, bored siblings who began popping and cracking their toe joints against the wooden floors of their house to create mysterious sounds. To their surprise, their parents eagerly bought the girls' claim that these were coded messages from a dead man and soon took their act to a much wider audience. While frank about the mundane origins of spiritualist phenomena, Lause is sympathetic to spiritualists themselves. He insightfully explains why the movement appealed to so many and demonstrates how spiritualist beliefs emerged organically from the hopes and fears of 19th-century Americans.

Lause's aim in Free Spirits is to trace connections between spiritualism and various currents of social and political radicalism. The first chapter begins with the buildup to the Civil War and the breakdown of the antebellum two-party system. Northern Democrats started organizing against pro-slavery domination of their party in the late 1840s, just as the Fox sisters went public. Spiritualism appears to have been a popular belief among early activists in what would become the Republican party. While the first two chapters look mainly at ordinary spiritualists, the third, entitled "Father Abraham," investigates the Lincolns' involvement in séances and other spiritualist activities. Their connections with this milieu has typically been attributed to the influence of the emotionally volatile First Lady Mary Todd, while Abraham was usually seen as thor-oughgoing skeptic. Lause argues that the President, while not a convinced spiritualist, was more curious about and open to the reality of spirit communication than has been previously believed. Doubting specific spiritualist claims did not necessarily translate into a rejection of the whole edifice. Indeed, many involved in the movement seem to have come from the ranks of free-thinking seekers who doubted conventional religion but who saw spiritualism as a type of scientific investigation of supernatural realities.

The fourth chapter, "Liberty," examines how spiritualists, along with many other Americans, seem to have become more radical over the course of the war. They wished the mass slaughter to have some higher, more noble meaning, beyond just preserving the Union, and thus were excited by the Emancipation Proclamation. The following chapter, "Equality" (perhaps the book's best) discusses the hope kindled in many spiritualists by Emancipation and the Union's victory. Did these momentous events portend a wholesale reconstruction of society? Perhaps changes were possible to the status of women, Native Americans, workers, and others. Chapter 6, "Fraternity," and the epilogue follow the story through the Reconstruction era and beyond. Some spiritualists retreated from their radical hopes while others moved eagerly into the burgeoning socialist and women's suffrage movements.

Spiritualism was a very loose, eclectic movement, akin to the New Age in our own time, which creates certain problem for the historian. It can be difficult to pin down majority opinions, social attitudes, or political inclinations when involvement was fleeting, leaders were temporary, and groups were small and distributed widely across the country. These limitations mean that the narrative line of Free Spirits is rather amorphous, particularly in the first two chapters. We hear much about the activities of local organizations, and declarations from smalltime local leaders: retired army officers, former judges, one-term state congressmen, and the like. We are told that (for example) some spiritualists supported strike action by unionized workers, while others disapproved. It can be difficult to tell the forest from the trees.

What can we know for certain? The great majority of spiritualists were from the North and the Midwest. There were very few Southerners involved, though this slowly began to change after the war. A majority were politically centrist or left of centre. Spiritualism overlapped with other heterodox currents: unsurprisingly, seekers skeptical of religious orthodoxy were also more likely to be skeptical of the conventional wisdom about women, politics, race, and so forth.

One intriguing example of this is the way that...