Radical Spirits

Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

Ann Braude

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780253056320
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

"Braude has discovered a crucial link between the early feminists and the spiritualists who so captured the American imagination." — Los Angeles Times In Radical Spirits, Ann Braude contends that the early women's rights movement and Spiritualism went hand in hand. Her book makes a convincing argument for the importance of religion in the study of American women's history. In this new edition, Braude discusses the impact of the book on the scholarship of the last decade and assesses the place of religion in interpretations of women's history in general and the women's rights movement in particular. A review of current scholarship and suggestions for further reading make it even more useful for contemporary teachers and students. "It would be hard to imagine a book that more insightfully combined gender, social, and religious history together more perfectly than Radical Spirits. Braude still speaks powerfully to unique issues of women's creativity—spiritual as well as political—in a superb account of the controversial nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement." —Jon Butler, Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University "Continually rewarding." — The New York Times Book Review "A fascinating, well-researched, and scholarly work on a peripheral aspect of the rise of the American feminist movement." — Library Journal "A vitally important book... [that] has... influenced a generation of young scholars." —Marie Griffith, associate director of the Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University "An insightful book and a delightful read." — Journal of American History

CHAPTER

1

“Unbroken Communication between the Infinite and All Beings”

In 1848, the dedicated Quaker abolitionists Amy and Isaac Post, like the other residents of Rochester, New York, heard rumors of mysterious noises in the nearby village of Hydesville.¹ The rumors told of raps on the walls and furniture of an old farmhouse that occurred only in the presence of two young daughters of the family who inhabited it. The apparent intelligence of the mysterious sounds convinced the family and neighbors that the spirit of a murdered peddler buried in the basement made the raps. The residents of Hydesville crowded the house to hear the spirit demonstrate its superhuman knowledge by giving the correct number of raps when asked the age or number of their children. Initially, Amy and Isaac Post “paid no more heed” to the much touted raps than to “the Old Salem witch stories.” Claims of unaccountable religious experiences were not unusual in western New York State, a section of the country “burned over” by repeated outpourings of the spirit and auspicious millennial tidings during the evangelical revivals of the Second Great Awakening.* But when the Posts learned that the family in which the mysterious sounds occurred was one with which they were “well acquainted,” they took them more seriously. Isaac Post wrote to his brother and sister-in-law that Kate and Margaret Fox, in whose presence the raps occurred, were “Girls of 12 & 14 years who used to live in our house at Cornhill and with whom we always had good understanding.” The Fox family deserted the apparently haunted house in hope of peace from the raps. Kate and Margaret were sent to Rochester to live with their older sister, Ann Leah Fish (See plates 1, 3).²

Here the story probably would have ended, but for the interest shown in the rappings by the Post family and the other indefatigable reformers who made up their circle of friends. The Posts’ home at 36 Sophia Street served as Rochester’s headquarters for reform lecturers and fugitive slaves, sometimes housing a dozen passengers on the Underground Railroad in a single night (See plate 2). Noted abolitionist speakers Abigail Kelly, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry C. Wright relished Amy’s hospitality and cherished her friendship. “I should love much to look into your home … about once in 24 hours,” Rochester abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote to Amy Post while absent on a speaking tour. Had Douglass looked in on an evening when the Posts had no guests, he would have found her sitting by the stove knitting stockings for the antislavery fair in Boston.³

Isaac Post reported that when Kate and Margaret Fox arrived from Hydesville “they felt very anxious that we should enjoy what they did there.” Within a few days, one of the sisters visited the Posts, together with family friends Abigail and Henry Bush. The guests retreated into a bedroom with Amy, and the raps commenced. Isaac described what followed in a letter to his brother: “I suppose I went with as much unbelief as Thomas felt when he was introduced to Jesus after he had ascended. When I looked in the door with my countenance so doubting and saw Abigail & Henry looking as tho they stood before the judgment seat, I felt rebuked and much more so when Abbi in her most gentle manner asked some questions. I heard very distinct thumps under the floor apparently and several apparent answers.” After this inexplicable experience, the Posts became the Fox sisters’ mentors and confidants, gathering a small group to meet weekly in search of the truth that might be revealed by communicating with the dead through the girls’ mediumship. Spiritualism joined the host of unpopular but heartfelt causes championed by the tireless reformers.⁴

Although later mediums would give verbatim messages from spirits, initially the raps were inarticulate, able to respond only “yes” or “no” to specific questions or to answer with a number, the number of raps made in succession. Isaac introduced the technique of reciting the alphabet so that the raps could spell words by sounding when the correct letter was reached. The process proved cumbersome and did not always improve the quality of the messages. On one occasion when the raps “demanded the alphabet” during dinner, Isaac found it difficult to divide the letters at which raps sounded into words. Finally, the raps revealed, “Put on as much molasses as he likes,” hardly the profound revelation for which investigators hoped.⁵ More satisfying communications resulted from direct questions such as those Isaac recorded during a session with Kate and Margaret in November 1848:

Dr. Ghase who had recently lost his mother, asked if his Mother’s Spirit was present. The answer was, she was. Whether she was happy/she was, whether her knowledge had increased since she passed away/it had. Whether she continually watched over him/she did. Then he asked about … a sister, whether his suspicions in regard to her death were correct. The answer, they were not. Would she have lived if other means had been used? The reply, she would not. Then he asked if [he] could be convinced that there could be spiritual manifestations, then he could get no more answers.⁶

Because the raps could communicate only in response to questions, the inquirers, rather than the mediums, set the agenda for the first spirit communications. True, even in Hydesville, a shower of affirmative raps greeted the question, “Are you a spirit?” But it was the direct inquiries of the Posts and their friends that revealed the presence of spirits other than that of the murdered peddler to whom the first raps were attributed. Persistent and repeated questions produced raps indicating the presence of other spirits, especially the spirits of dead relatives of those present. Investigators used sessions with the Fox sisters to pursue relief from the host of anxieties that accompanied separation at death, and many of them received it. The hunger for communion with the dead gave Spiritualism its content, transforming what may have been a teenage prank into a new religion. Americans wanted to talk to spirits, and they would have found a way to do it with or without Kate and Margaret Fox.

Most of the early investigators who set the course of the new movement were Quakers who, like the Posts, found themselves unable to participate in the Society of Friends because they believed it had strayed from its original principles. Quaker doctrine taught that the spirit of God lay within each individual and that this inner light was the primary vehicle for religious truth. The doctrine of the inner light produced an ongoing tension within Quakerism. Quaker tradition emphasized a simple life-style, and vested authority in meetings to ensure that members complied with rigorous standards of behavior and segregation from the non-Quaker “world.” But, at the same time, Quaker doctrine undermined the authority of meetings and elders to enforce those standards by encouraging anyone who felt moved by the spirit to speak freely in meetings and by recognizing the authority of the inner light within each individual. During the antebellum period, Friends who felt moved to testify against the injustice of buying and selling human beings were silenced by an increasingly rigid disciplinary structure. Obedience to conscience clashed with obedience to Quaker elders and to the authority of meetings.

In 1827, the conflict between the authority of meetings and the freedom of the individual to act according to the promptings of the spirit caused a split within the Society of Friends. The followers of Elias Hicks, a cousin of Amy Post, withdrew to form separate meetings because they believed that orthodox Friends’ meetings had become too formalized and no longer gave adequate freedom for individuals to act according to the dictates of the inner light. Hicks also believed that the Quaker establishment had become too enmeshed with the institutions and material comforts of “the world” and that tolerance of slavery confirmed this excessive worldliness. The Posts, like most antislavery Friends, withdrew from their meeting and joined the Hicksites. But even the Hicksite meeting imposed unacceptable restraints. When the Hicksites censured Amy and Isaac for participating in antislavery societies with non-Quakers, the Posts withdrew to help found yet another group, the Congregational Friends, in Waterloo, New York, composed predominantly of ex-Friends who wanted greater liberty to express their political views. The term congregational implied the adoption of a congregational form of polity, meaning that the Waterloo meeting did not recognize the authority of the Quaker hierarchy over the local congregation and would not answer to the Hicksite Genessee Yearly Meeting.⁷

The Waterloo Congregational Friends based their beliefs on the Quaker principle that the law of God is written in every human soul. Because human beings were created in the image of God, each one, “however less or more perfect be the manifestations of the principles of his nature,” was in fact “a limited transcript of the perfect Architect.” These views led the Waterloo friends to conclude that “an unbroken chain of communication” exists “between the Infinite and all beings.” Of all known facts, they found “The existence of this communication between the finite and the Infinite” to be “first in magnitude and most absorbing in interest.” Because God’s image resided within each individual, they believed any limitation on absolute freedom of conscience impeded the divine will. In George Fox’s exhortation to “Mind the light,” they saw “the beginning and end of all religion.” They left the Society of Friends because they viewed its increasing regulation of its members’ freedom of expression as impeding communication with God.⁸

Within months of the formation of the Waterloo Congregational Friends, its members learned of the raps that occurred in the presence of the Fox sisters, and many accepted the spiritual origin of the mysterious noises. Communication with spirits appealed to devout Quaker reformers as an expression of the doctrine of the inner light. “It was some like friends preaching. They were relying on the spirit,” observed Isaac Post. The “spiritual telegraph” reconnected the lines of communication with God that they feared had been severed by orthodox Quakerism’s departure from its early practices. Congregational Friend Sarah Fish initially greeted the raps with skepticism. But, on reflection, she decided that they were within the bounds of Quaker teaching about communication between human and divine. “I became perfectly satisfied that I had resisted the Divine Spirit in my own heart by making light of what that child said,” she wrote to Amy Post following an early séance. Sarah Fish laid down her pen after writing the above line, then heard raps on her own bedstand. She asked that the raps repeat if she was correct that they came at that moment to confirm the message of the light within. She heard more raps, which dispelled her last shreds of skepticism. “I am more than convinced of the truth that our departed friends are with us striving for our good,” she concluded the next morning. Through networks of kin and friendship, news of the raps spread quickly to Quaker communities in Long Island, Nantucket, Philadelphia, and throughout New York State.⁹

The spiritual longings of the Waterloo Friends for intercourse with the infinite grew out of their Quaker heritage, but it overlapped with an urge shared by many Americans: the desire for communication with the dead. Investigators eager for news of departed loved ones, such as the Posts’ friend Dr. Chase, asked for it directly. The Posts learned, in response to inquiries, that the mediums could see Isaac’s three dead sisters as well as the Posts’ recently deceased five-year-old daughter, Matilda. “They always speak of seeing Matilda [and] say she is happy around us,” Isaac wrote to his brother and sister-in-law. A son, also lost at the age of five, but many years earlier, communicated as well. By addressing their own spiritual needs, and by asking the questions they did, the disaffected Quakers of upstate New York created a religious movement that would satisfy the yearnings of mid-century Americans across the country.¹⁰

More substantive communications began after Kate and Margaret’s older sister, Leah Fox Fish, mother of three children, proved to be a medium. Leah was prone to headaches, from which she found relief when Isaac “put her asleep” by “magnetizing” her. In the resultant trance state, she communed freely with spirits, especially those of Hannah Kirby Post (Amy’s sister and Isaac’s first wife) and the Posts’ departed children. “I should like she could remain so happy when awake and so judicious for she seems far in advance of her wakeful state,” Isaac wrote to Amy. While in trance, Leah “reasoned very philosophical.” She looked right at Isaac and said that “it was not true that first love was best for after the object was removed we are free to have the same feeling center on another.” This remark held special significance for Amy and Isaac, both of whom lost a first love before marrying each other. The man whom Amy once regarded as her “only source of … earthly happiness” died shortly before they were to have been married. Amy then went to live in the household of her older sister, Hannah, and Hannah’s husband, Isaac Post. When Hannah died, Amy stayed on to care for her sister’s children and eventually married their father. Twenty years later, having produced four children and buried two of them, Amy and Isaac Post found affirmation from spirit communication for the shape their lives had taken as well as consolation for the many lost hopes they had once held dear.¹¹

After a year of investigation, the spirits demanded a public demonstration of their intelligent communication. The spirits instructed Isaac Post and his cousin George Willets to rent the city’s largest hall for three nights and charge the public seventy-five cents each to witness the Fox sisters’ mediumship. Eliab Capron, a Congregational Friend from Auburn, New York, was assigned by the spirits to deliver an address explaining the nature of the manifestations. On November 14, 1849, four hundred people filled Corinthian Hall to hear the mysterious noises. The meeting appointed a committee of skeptics to investigate and report back to a similar assembly on a subsequent evening. When this committee announced itself unable to discover any fraud or trick by which the girls produced the raps, the second meeting turned rowdy. Throughout, Amy Post lent Catherine and Margaret “the aid of her gentle counsel and the strength of her irreproachable name.” She accompanied them to the platform in Corinthian Hall and forced her way into a chamber where the girls were disrobed and subjected to minute examination.¹²

Eliab Capron subsequently tried to induce the Fox girls’ mother to permit them to travel to New York City to demonstrate their mediumship. Mrs. Fox initially objected. But, in June 1850, she and her three daughters accompanied Capron to New York. They rented rooms at Barnum’s Hotel, where Capron advertised public demonstrations, three times a day, admission one dollar. These demonstrations attracted enough attention to create a demand for private séances for select audiences. A notable array of literati gathered at the home of a New York clergyman to hear the raps. Guests included author James Fenimore Cooper, historian George Bancroft, poet William Cullen Bryant, poet and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis, reformer and publisher of the New York Tribune Horace Greeley, and George Ripley, Greeley’s head editorial writer and founder of Brook Farm. According to Greeley, the séance puzzled most of those present but impressed Cooper, who received accurate answers to questions about a sister killed fifty years before. Willis described the “Post-Mortuum Soiree” less sympathetically to readers of the Home Journal, noting “the disinclination which these spirits seemed to have for any intercourse with editors.”¹³

Greeley became a frequent investigator and invited the Fox family into his home. There they conducted a series of séances, at which Greeley’s wife, Molly, received messages that she believed to be from her recently deceased five-year-old son. Greeley proclaimed himself “convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt of [the Fox sisters’] perfect integrity and good faith.” He assured his readers in the Tribune that, “Whatever may be the origin or cause of the ‘rappings,’ the ladies in whose presence they occur do not make them.”¹⁴ Kate lived with the Greeleys the following fall, which brought much comfort to the bereaved family but little to the young medium. “How I hate her,” Kate wrote of Mrs. Greeley to her br...