Upstate Cauldron

Eccentric Spiritual Movements in Early New York State

Joscelyn Godwin

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781438455945, 9781438455952
• eBook ISBN: 9781438455969
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Bronze Medalist, 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the US Northeast -Best Regional Non-Fiction Category
Honorable Mention, 2015 Foreword Reviews INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards in the Religion Category From 1776 to 1914, an amazing collection of prophets, mediums, sects, cults, utopian communities, and spiritual leaders arose in Upstate New York. Along with the best known of these, such as the Shakers, Mormons, and Spiritualists, this book explores more than forty other spiritual leaders or groups, some of them virtually unknown, but all of them fascinating. The author uncovers common threads that characterize these homegrown spiritualities, including roots in Western esoteric traditions, liberation from the psychological pressures of dogmatic Christianity, a preoccupation with sex, and involvement in the radical reform movements of the day. In addition to maps and photographs of surviving buildings and monuments, the book also features a gazetteer of sites listing 150 locations connected to these groups, which may be used as a helpful travel guide to the region.

ILLUSTRATION 1.1. Sir William Johnson. Statue in Johnstown by Pioggi, with assistance of Edward Lamson Henry, erected by the Aldine Society, 1904.1 Author’s photograph.

CHAPTER 1

The Historical Background2

During the first century of American independence, at least thirty spiritual movements, cults, utopian communities, or new religions started in Upstate New York. The Shakers, the Mormons, the Oneida Community, and spiritualism are merely the best known. The others range from the obscure to the ephemeral; all were “eccentric,” in the sense of being outside the political and social norms of the era, and in rejecting the Protestant churches that supposedly formed its spiritual bedrock. The whole phenomenon, with its concentration in time and space, is without parallel in social or religious history.

In trying to account for it, historians have turned to the Christian revivals of the “Burned-over District,” as the central and western region came to be known; the mass emigration of New Englanders cut loose from their home churches; the mushrooming towns along the Erie Canal and the opening to the West, with its sense of a new world dawning; and the growing disgust with institutionalized racial and gender injustice. Others see a “psychic highway” across the state, nourished by native spirits, earth energies, and other intangibles.3 In an epilogue I will reconsider these ideas, but for now this book is more about facts than theory. It emphasizes the lesser-known personalities and, when possible, goes to the primary sources. Each succeeding chapter begins with an original statement, a credo, or an account of some extraordinary happening. It is for the reader to wonder at these outer reaches of human experience, which some call folly, others the broaching of boundaries between worlds.

I find this study by turns fascinating, comical, and moving. Besides its value as a human document, it is a laboratory for the study of religious origins. Here are recent cases of men and women who had visions or encounters with divine beings, assumed missions of cosmic importance, received doctrines or sacred books, attracted disciples, and started movements. Some blazed for a moment, then fizzled out like the ancient religious radicals Apollonius of Tyana, Marcion the Gnostic, al-Hallaj, or Sabbatai Zevi.4 Others, like Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed, succeeded in planting an inextinguishable root. What determines the difference? I do not know, any more than I know why one particular acorn becomes an oak tree. My principle is always to respect, and usually to credit, the experience that lit the fuse, but not its interpretation or the doctrinal baggage train that follows it. That is a study in itself, reflecting the character, limitations, prior beliefs, and motivations of the person reporting the experience.

Readers familiar with Western esoteric traditions will notice many echoes among our provincial visionaries, such as astral journeys like those recounted in Plato’s Republic and the Hermetic Poimandres, the search for hidden meanings in the books of Genesis and Revelation, and the mythic origins of Freemasonry and the Rosicrucians. Early Mormonism owes a distant debt to alchemy, as does spiritualism to Swedenborg, while the Theosophical Society and the occultist movement that appeared in the later nineteenth century were explicitly rooted in Egyptian tradition.

On a more mundane level, every character portrayed in this book had to deal with historical and geographical realities. They all had ancestors, parents, a childhood, and some sort of education. Like everyone else they needed money, companionship, and a home. Many of them started as dirt-poor subsistence farmers. Yet unencumbered by today’s legal and governmental controls, they could move around freely, reinvent themselves, and live quite well on next to nothing. To consider their material conditions brings them to life, and often earns our sympathy. So this chapter continues by sketching the main events and currents of their world.

We begin with geography. Tourists are often surprised to find that New York’s two major attractions, Manhattan and Niagara Falls, are at either end of a state the size of England. Everything in between is considered “up” with respect to New York City and Long Island, but exactly where the Upstate region begins will depend on whom you ask. In Manhattan they may answer, “Yonkers.” Others will exclude the commuter belt, the Catskills, even the Hudson Valley up to Albany. As a longtime resident I have my own definition, which suits the subject matter of this book: Upstate begins where the magnetism of New York City no longer affects the mental compass.

In the period of this study, which is roughly from the Revolution of 1776 until the First World War, the region was transformed from a wilderness into an economic powerhouse. At least, that was the point of view of the colonists and their descendants. The whole territory originally belonged to the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy: from east to west the Mohawk, Oneida, Tuscarora, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca.5 Both natives and colonists had long traded in animal furs: otter, mink, wildcat, bear, and especially beaver, which supplied the felt hat industry on both sides of the Atlantic. The Indians trapped the animals and provided the pelts in exchange for tools, cottons, firearms, and liquor. This arrangement faltered when the colonists coveted the Indians’ lands as well. During the eighteenth century their settlements crept up the Mohawk River to its navigable end at Fort Stanwix (in present-day Rome), and up its southern tributaries to Schoharie and Cherry Valley. Many of the pioneers were German refugees from the Palatinate, dispossessed by European wars. Others emigrated out of opportunism, like the Irish-born magnate Sir William Johnson, who became the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs and accumulated about 170,000 acres. The Van Rensselaers, Dutch patroons, owned even more, including the present capital district. Among their innumerable tenants were Ann Lee and her Shaker community (see chapter 3). The oldest churches and mansions of the Mohawk Valley are rare survivals of this semi-feudal frontier period.6

In the eighteenth century, the native tribes were dragged into the rivalries of French and English colonists, themselves the reflection of wars in Europe. It was largely Sir William Johnson’s diplomacy and empathy for the Indians that enabled the settlers along the Mohawk to live in peace. This was not to last. At the Revolution the Oneidas and the small Tuscarora nation sided with the rebels, advised by their missionary, the Rev. Samuel Kirkland.7 The other four Iroquois nations took the British side and helped to harass the rebels, spreading a reign of terror among the settlers. Following the massacre of Cherry Valley, where Mohawks, unrestrained by their Tory leaders, scalped and mutilated men, women, and children, George Washington ordered a punitive expedition. In the summer of 1779, Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton set out, Sullivan marching from Pennsylvania and Clinton from Schenectady. Both made use of the Susquehanna River, Clinton with a celebrated damming of its source in Otsego Lake to generate enough flow to carry his transport boats.8 The two generals converged at Tioga with a force of about four thousand and proceeded to destroy the Iroquois settlements of central New York, driving the surviving inhabitants into British-held territory and burning houses and crops to prevent their return. Much the same happened to the Mohawks, as their valley became the scene of raids and atrocities, and by the end of the war was virtually a wasteland. Broken and demoralized, the Iroquois Confederacy dissolved, though ironically it served as a model for Franklin, Jefferson, and their colleagues as they designed their own union of states.

The Sullivan Expedition returned with news of the potential richness of the Finger Lakes region. Once the war was over, it served to reward veterans with their promised grants of land. In true military fashion, the area from Manlius to Geneva and from Watkins Glen to Lake Ontario was divided on a regular grid into townships, and these into plots of about five hundred acres. A clerk in the surveying office baptized the towns with classical names, to match the new nation’s self-identification with republican Rome and democratic Athens, and threw in some English cultural heroes for good measure: hence the place names of Ithaca, Hector, Scipio, Camillus, Cincinnatus, Locke, Dryden, and the rest.

The Military Tract, as it was called, ended at the Preemption Line that ran north-south from Sodus Point, just clearing Seneca Lake. Present-day roads still follow it and bear its name. Whether by chance or by geodetic intention, it is the exact meridian of Washington, D.C. (77°02’E). During the 1780s the region to the west of the line, officially Seneca country, hatched a new breed of speculators and land agents, and new complications of ownership. Jemima Wilkinson’s utopian community (see chapter 3) was both a beneficiary and a victim of these. Some of the deals beggar the imagination. For instance, in 1788 Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham bought preemptive rights to the entire tract of about six million acres from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, whose title went back to pre-Revolutionary times. This gave them the right to sell it, once they had persuaded the Indians to sell their title. The company’s land office in Canandaigua made their village into an economic hub for the region. After Phelps and Gorham had failed to complete their deals, the Holland Land Company, owned by investors from the Netherlands, took over and did the same for the village of Batavia, named for their native land. Nor was the process limited to the west. To the north, the state disposed of millions of acres of wilderness and Black River country to Alexander Macomb and other investors. This is where Charles Grandison Finney (see chapter 2) turned from lawyer to revivalist firebrand. We will be hearing later (see chapter 13) of a central New York land agent, Gerrit Smith, who stood at the nexus of the radical and spiritualist movements. He sold former Oneida acreage from his red-brick office in the village of Peterboro. A very few land agents chose to settle Upstate and build mansions in Georgian style, such as William Constable, Jr.’s Constable Hall in Constableville (!), or Lorenzo, the house of John Lincklaen in Cazenovia.

While fortunes were made and lost during this redistribution, the greatest losers were the Indians themselves. Those who had not already fled the state at the Sullivan campaign were either induced to leave for reservations in Wisconsin or Kansas, or confined to a few widely separated reservations in New York: Buffalo Creek and Tonawanda near Buffalo, Cattaraugus on Lake Erie, Allegany on the Allegheny River, tiny Oil Spring on Cuba Lake, Onondaga south of Syracuse, and Oneida south of that city. The latter four remain in tribal possession to this day. This set the stage for the appearance of Handsome Lake (see chapter 4), the Seneca prophet whose personal life paralleled his tribe’s descent into wretchedness. The new religion he brought them was a first step toward reasserting their racial and spiritual identity.

This is where our history really begins. A flood of emigrants left the New England states, where the farmland was poor and scarce and there were few opportunities for younger sons to set up on their own. A number of our characters belonged to such families. The Mormon leaders Joseph Smith and Brigham Young (see chapter 6) were both born in Vermont in the early years of the century, left as children, and were raised respectively in Wayne and Chenango counties. The spiritualist and world traveler James Peebles (see chapter 21) was also born in Vermont and raised on the Chenango River. Rachel Baker (see chapter 5), the sleeping preacher, was born in Massachusetts and raised in Onondaga County. Others came from Pennsylvania, Canada, or directly from Europe, like the German Inspirationists (see chapter 9), who emigrated as a group and bought land near Buffalo. Ann Lee (see chapter 3) came from England as a religious refugee with her first Shaker companions. The parents of Thomas Lake Harris (see chapter 16), leaving England for reasons unknown, set up shop in Utica. Mary Andrews (see chapter 13) came from famine-struck Ireland to work as a servant, until her mediumistic talents made her a celebrity in Moravia and beyond.

The motives of those who arrived Upstate as adults were more varied. John Humphrey Noyes (see chapter 10) and John Murray Spear (see chapter 15) left New England on their own initiative, finding New York a less hostile environment for their social experiments and theological heresies. Spear’s community at Kiantone was short-lived and he returned to Massachusetts; Noyes’s at Oneida made social history. Paschal Beverly Randolph, medium and sexologist (see chapter 14), came from Boston to Peterboro because Gerrit Smith was giving farmland to free blacks. Timothy Brown, the builder of the Spirit House in Georgetown (see chapter 17), sold his sawmill and land holdings in Vermont and joined relatives already in Madison County.

Some of our characters were born in the state and felt its influences from an early age. Parley Pratt (see chapter 7) came from Burlington, a hamlet in Otsego County, and encountered first the Shakers, then the Mormons. Cyrus Teed, proponent of the concave earth theory (see chapter 19), came from an equally obscure corner of Delaware County, where his father built waterwheels. He discovered the speculative blend of magnetism, electricity, and alchemy that was still taken seriously outside the dominant institutions. Among the spiritualists and mediums, Andrew Jackson Davis (see chapter 11) was born a cobbler’s son and grew up on the Hudson among Swedenborgians and mesmerizers; the Fox sisters came of age in the radical hotbed of Rochester. Theirs must have been a different experience from life on the inland routes, like Amanda Theodosia Jones’s in East Bloomfield (see chapter 17), Amelia Bloomer’s in Homer, or Cora Richmond’s in distant Cuba. Of those mentioned so far, only Noyes had a privileged upbringing and a Yale education. Somehow that did not matter as it might have in stuffier parts of the country, or in Europe. Snobbery came late to a region without an aristocracy or venerated institutions.

The first challenge facing Upstate pioneers was to turn forest into farmland, unless they were fortunate to own areas that the Indians had already cleared and cultivated. The very trees that stood in their way yielded a first cash crop: they were felled, burned, and the ashes soaked in water and dried to make potash. An acre of virgin forest produced two tons of this chemical compound,9 essential for making soap and glass and in high demand by European countries that had already destroyed their forests. Potash and beaver pelts were the foundation of Upstate’s prosperity, but the farmers dreamed of fields of waving wheat and contented cattle. It was one thing to be a homesteader, supplying one family’s needs, and another to be an investor. Many of the settlers had sunk considerable cash into their land purchases, and expected to become rich through them.

Two of the main requirements for development were a sawmill and a gristmill: the first, to cut trees into manageable and saleable lumber, and the second, to grind grain into flour. In a region of lakes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Historical Background
• 2. The Religious Background
• 3. The Female Face of God
• 4. The Indian Tragedy
• 5. Sleeping Preachers
• 6. Mormon Roots
• 7. The Square and Compass
• 8. Not the End of the World
• 9. Brief Utopias
• 10. Perfection in This Life
• 11. The Poughkeepsie Seer
• 12. Rapping Spirits
• 13. The Progressives Take Notice
• 14. Sex, Drugs, and Mirrors
• 15. Chautauqua Follies
• 16. Open Breathing
• 17. Practical Spirits
• 18. Theosophy, from Ithaca to Halcyon
• 19. The Hollow Earth
• 20. Freethought
• 21. Oz and Ends
• 22. The Fra
• 23. The Craftsman
• 24. The Rochester Yogi
• 25. The Cauldron Refired
• Gazetteer of Sites
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover