Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era available in Paperback
Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era
- ISBN-10:
- 0252081757
- ISBN-13:
- 9780252081750
- Pub. Date:
- 06/21/2016
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0252081757
- ISBN-13:
- 9780252081750
- Pub. Date:
- 06/21/2016
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252081750 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 06/21/2016 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
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Free Spirits
Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era
By Mark A. Lause
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-04030-6
CHAPTER 1
Free Democrats to the Republicans
Radical Spiritualists and the Antislavery Insurgency
In early 1854, while Warren B. Chase had been out on a speaking tour, news of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill reached his neighbors back at Ripon — what had been the socialist community of Ceresco, peopled largely by spiritualists. Befitting the location, as many women as men attended the gatherings that condemned the bipartisan opening of the West to slavery and declared themselves absolved of old party allegiances and in favor of an altogether new party. They suggested adopting "a cherished name with our foreign population of every nationality." Specifically, they proposed to call themselves "Republicans, Républicains, Republikaner, Republicanos — or by some modification of it in all European countries, and this name meets them here like an old friend." Horace Greeley helped sell the idea nationally. While later historians ascribed to the party "a thousand birthplaces" in the Northern protest meetings against the Nebraska Bill, those at Ripon detonated many of them.
Although spiritualists later sought to identify their movement with 1848, the year of revolutionary upheavals in Europe and of the Free-Soil electoral protest led by former president Martin Van Buren against Southern domination of the Democratic Party, in reality spiritualism flowered as Van Buren and kindred politicians trailed back into their party, leaving the insurgency to the most stalwart radical elements who reorganized as the Free Democratic Party, in which spiritualists became ubiquitous. These political shifts brought antislavery political leaders to Washington, providing the movement with its first strong foothold there. By 1854-56 spiritualism grew with the rise of sectional tensions. Kansas became the catalyst for a major shift in Free Democratic circles as well as politics generally. Spiritualists, particularly in the upper Midwest, made vital decisions that marked the emergence and triumph of a new Republican Party.
The Free Democrats
Nonslaveholding states had accepted the national dominance of the Democratic Party for a generation, and Southern slavery remained the party's preoccupation. Spiritualism, even at its least political and most commercial, tended to validate the judgments of the insurgents. The Vermont or Wisconsin farmer suspicious of slavery and its influence experienced a kind of feedback loop, encouraging an examination of those suspicions that transformed them into an increasing hostility. Doing so among the increasingly like-minded fostered concerted action. Spiritualist mediumship, in general, translated the abstract ideals into concrete practice.
More important, the spiritualists provided a sizable number of those whose break with the politics of the past had become permanent. As Van Buren and his followers went back to the Democrats, thousands from Vermont to Ohio reorganized as Independent Democrats or Free Democrats. This happened simultaneously with the explosive growth of spiritualism and in those areas that experienced the most explosive growth of spiritualism at the same time.
The abolitionist National Era reported grassroots meetings and conventions across New England and as far as Ohio, but found it "impossible to publish the proceedings of all the Independent Democratic meetings which are sent to us." The 1849 Massachusetts state convention consisted of what the Spirit of the Age called "the elements of the former Workingmen's party." It reflected the assumption that "no social injury could result to the white race from the oppression and servitude of the black." Urging "universal reform," it warned that any party "professing to represent the interests of Labor, which leagues itself with an aristocracy, enslaving the colored laborer at home, as a means of wealth, and preaching democracy abroad as a means of power, degrades Labor everywhere." It also warned of an "alliance between the champions of Southern free Labor and certain conservative interests of the North, as for instance that of manufacturing capital." They insisted that "a party of consistent progress and reform must grow up, representing the religious hope and the best wisdom of the people of all sections." "Labor is universally dishonored," it declared, adding that "the first step for its elevation must be the limitation and extinction of Slavery."
As some of the more privileged of the antislavery radicals who had clung to the insurgency — men such as Samuel Gridley Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and George Frisbie Hoar — clung to the Free Democrats, they found themselves regularly in the company of plebeian militants. The Boston Herald scoffed that they remained a relatively isolated third party, discussing its problems as those of "a workingmen's party." "If the workingmen had sufficient money and leisure, we should counsel the formation of a workingmen's party, to exist, at least, until labor received an equal attention with capital at the hands of our Legislators." Internal factionalism "does more to keep any proper industrial reform out of our Legislative arena, than all other causes." "Our mechanics and working men have too long trusted others. They must now depend upon themselves." What the Democratic press meant by this, of course, was that workers should assert their independence by ignoring the more radical of their number and supporting the party.
Philadelphia Free Democrats called all those opposed to the Whig and Democratic Parties to meet at the courthouse on June 28. George Lippard spoke, and much of the meeting's leadership came from veterans of those cooperative ventures of his Brotherhood of the Union. William B. Thomas presided, with other speeches by August H. Duganne, Charles Goepp, William J. Mullen, and John Sheddon. A well-known spiritualist, Sheddon had been in the Chartist movement before immigrating, where he became an "able and powerful advocate" of land reform. Listeners described his stock speech for the Free Democrats as "beyond description," one "not soon to be forgotten by the workingmen."
Spiritualists made implicit claims to Lippard himself, and he certainly never disabused them of it publicly. He had sought out the Fox sisters when he got to Rochester and "almost fainted away" when he received "three blows, from an unseen hand, upon his shoulder." He left credulous of spirit communication, and his work regularly showed the influence of spiritualist ideas. However, Lippard had a Gothic penchant for old-fashioned Christianity, enjoying a long friendship with trenchant critic of spiritualism Charles Chauncey Burr. In his declining illness, Lippard responded to two visiting spiritualists by referring to the small bust of Christ on the mantel: "That's the spirit I believe in." Nevertheless, his close identification with the movement reflected his hostility to orthodoxy.
The prominence of spiritualists among the Free Democrats became even more pronounced in the West. Spiritualists and Free Democrats such as Joshua R. Giddings and John C. Vaughan turned up at midwestern gatherings of peace organizations and antislavery societies. Early on, Oliver Johnson, the editor of the Anti Slavery Bugle at Salem, Ohio, embraced spirit communications in principle. Joel Tiffany, who had defended the Fox sisters against the Burrs, had come to Cleveland to assist Giddings at the True Democrat. Then, too, the antislavery press reprinted Fourierist materials and cited the "striking similarity in the policy of the Monopolist classes the world over." Ohio Free Democrats also adopted radical land measures because "the use of the soil is as sacred as their right to life itself."
The Free Democrats veered into even more radical directions in Wisconsin and Michigan. The politically more conservative judge John W. Edmonds found his 1854 "tour thro' the West" an eye-opener. His discussions with people there convinced him that, as he later wrote Abraham Lincoln, "the Anti Slavery sentiment would yet control the election of President."
Chase, who had earlier taken the demand for woman suffrage into the territorial constitutional convention, helped rally those Wisconsin insurgents unwilling to follow the politicians back into the Democratic Party. Illegitimate and raised in a Yankee orphanage, Chase pursued the demons of success into a fine middle-class respectability, but remained the consummate outsider, the self-described "Lone One." Even as he organized a socialist community at Ceresco, he became prominent in state politics, running for governor in 1849 as a Free Democrat. Although the advent of spiritualism in the region found him middle-aged, he took to the road to campaign on its behalf. The two endeavors kept him on the road so continually that he once carried his baggage five miles through the rain and mud to Nemah. "If this was not a tramp life," he recalled, "I do not know what could be." Hundreds had similar experiences.
The figure of Chase also loomed larger as the National Industrial Congress began holding its annual gatherings of social radicals from across the country in the Midwest. What was left of Cincinnati's Spiritual Brotherhood hosted the meeting of 1849, which called for "the Brotherhood of the Race" before cholera struck the city and scattered the event. The next year, Chase called to order the 1850 session at Chicago. "All truth whether social, religious, political, physiological, and psychological constitutes unity," it declared, "and no fragmentary reform can be carried out without going hand in hand with all other reforms." It called for women's equality and explicitly denounced slavery. When the assembly returned east, gathering at Albany in 1851, the first black delegate requested and gained admission. The emergence of a spiritualist movement coincided with the more coherent and unified social critique of antebellum reformers focused on slavery.
In May 1852, for example, the Milwaukee Land Reform Association, "composed of 300 members," elected delegates to the upcoming National Industrial Congress scheduled for Washington, D.C. Few doing so back east may have been officeholders or men of influence, but the Wisconsin gathering included Congressman Charles Durkee, as well as the transplanted Henry D. Barron, then editing the Waukesha Democrat. When the National Industrial Congress gathered that summer in Washington, Congressman Durkee took the chair and presided.
On August 10, roughly two thousand Free Democrats assembled at Pitts- burgh's Masonic Hall. Senator Henry Wilson presided, and the list of vice presidents included a number of prominent participants in the spiritualist movement, including Chase, Sheddon, Gerrit Smith, Giddings, J. E. Snodgrass, and Frederick Douglass. They selected Senator John P. Hale and Congressman George W. Julian to run for president and vice president. However, the remark- able convention cast three ballots to nominate Smith for president and, as vice presidential candidates, three each for abolitionist land reformers James H. Collins and George Henry Evans.
Most important, the Free Democrats sustained their party beyond the presidential campaign. As speakers such as Chase took to the road as full-time missionaries for the spiritualist movement, they linked it to radical antislavery politics. Events in the state capital drew Chase back to Madison in January 1853, where he provided some assistance to the antislavery forces, became an officer of the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, and discussed spiritualism with the governor. At the height of the campaign, he reported a single spiritualist in an audience of twenty. Returning the next July, he found as many active mediums out of an audience of hundreds. He reported that they were bathing one man "with the electro-magnetic fluid," which had cured him of his "violent convulsions."
Particularly in Wisconsin, the agitation proved very productive. After one tour, Chase stopped to visit Henry D. Barron, then living at Waukesha. Too, such national figures such as Cora L. V. Scott toured the state, along with her mother. By 1854 at least some of the Free Democrats and their allies in the Wisconsin Legislature discussed sending socialist Chase to the U.S. Senate, but he had no interest in leaving his work for spiritualism at that point. Instead, the legislature chose Durkee, also a spiritualist, leaving Chase free to tour the East Coast.
New York City
New York City illustrates the parallel development and convergence of spiritualism and antislavery politics. Despite its studied homespun simplicity — or, more likely, partly because of it — spiritualism gained a broad following in the metropolis. "What," wondered the stupefied diarist George Templeton Strong, "would I have said six years ago to anybody who predicted that before the enlightened nineteenth century was ended hundreds of thousands of people in this country would believe themselves able to communicate daily with the ghosts of their grandfathers?" With an unexpected alacrity, insights promoted as humble, unlearned, and rural in their origins also captivated Strong's friends and neighbors in the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated center of American civilization.
Some in New York had been interested in earlier versions of spirit communication. By 1849 the Univercoelum and Spiritual Philosopher came into the orbit of Davis's admirers. Having absorbed the Christian Rationalist and, later, the Harbinger of the Fourierists, the paper published prominent writers from Ralph Waldo Emerson to George Lippard, but always remained more concerned with the socialism of Fourier than the trances of Davis. In 1849, before his death, John P. Cornell, the Cincinnati radical who owned the controlling interest, transferred it to the Christian Socialist, and it continued as the Spirit of the Age.
Some New Yorkers readily welcomed the Fox sisters in 1850. Families of publishers such as the phrenologists Lorenzo N. Fowler and New Hampshireborn Horace Greeley had also lost children. Then approaching forty, Greeley had spent half of his life in New York City after a difficult and hardworking youth and become the printers' printer. Grating against the irrationality of the world he found there, he became naturally drawn to ideas that offered some hopes for a rational human order, which had earlier interested Eliab W. Capron, Barron, and others in Fourierism.
The proslavery and socially reactionary Democratic New York Herald openly scoffed at spiritualists as "a singular collection of dupes and fanatics, resembling more a congregation of lunatics than a company of rational creatures." Yet on the Fox sisters' first visit, Captain Isaiah Rynders took the girls under his wing to introduce them to the leading lights in that Democratic community. A rabid white supremacist, founder of the Empire Club, and participant in overseas expansionist ventures, Rynders also headed an underworld organization of "sluggers" for Tammany Hall who kept its critics intimidated.
On the day the Fox sisters arrived in the city, they gave a persuasive demonstration of their powers at a private home. Their audience included historian George Bancroft and novelist James Fenimore Cooper, as well as poets William Cullen Bryant and Nathaniel P. Willis. Reporting for the Tribune was George Ripley, another key Fourierist leader. Greeley encouraged their plans to give public sittings and urged Leah to charge not one dollar a sitting but five dollars, to "keep the rabble away." Supporters were so eager to keep them in the city that Judge John W. Edmonds offered to pay for the education of Maggie and Katie. Broadway theaters cranked out a new song, "The Rochester Rappings at Barnum Hotel." On September 30, when the Fox girls left the city, various groups determined to continue the meetings and experimentation.
A "New York Circle" took shape on November 14, only a year after the movement's Rochester debut. In addition to those mentioned, Andrew J. Davis's old friend Stephen B. Brittan became increasingly interested in establishing a paper for the movement. He started the Spiritual Age with W. S. Courney in 1857, but it bounced from shop to shop before merging into A. E. Newton's New England Spiritualist and becoming the Spiritual Eclectic, which was published as late as i860.
In the end, Brittan's joint publishing venture with wealthy New York match manufacturer Charles Partridge bore fruit. Rubber manufacturer Horace H. Day — who had yet to lose his legal battle with Charles Goodyear — worked with Judge Edmonds to make spiritualism acceptable to their peers. Edmonds had observed the Fox sisters upstate and privately attended séances at the home of Leah Fish as "an inquirer and by no means a believer," before declaring himself a proponent, determined to make it more respectable and acceptable to other professionals.
Over the next few years, circles proliferated in the city. Some favored the model of the church congregation under a single pastor, such as Thomas Lake Harris, then passing through the city. Reportedly, "a large body of the congregation who call themselves Christian Spiritualists, being better pleased with Mr. Harris than any of their other speakers, have desired for some time to make him their regular minister." Certainly, though, even the self-defined Christians in the movement found it necessary that the faith be "revised and corrected." Many spiritualists, however, seemed to prefer the structure of a lyceum, providing a platform to diverse speakers.
The Fox sisters returned in the winter of 1851-52 to find a movement that had largely superseded them. Leah leased a brownstone at 78 West Twenty-Sixth Street near Madison Square, and they resumed afternoon and night demonstrations. Maggie had grown to womanhood and taken up with a handsome fellow celebrity, Arctic explorer Dr. Elisha Kent Kane. Despite their own continued ecumenical approach to the spirit world, the reactionary Rynders had faded from the scene, having become less concerned about communications with spirits than translating as many Spaniards and Cubans as possible into that state.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Free Spirits by Mark A. Lause. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Prologue America's 1848: Republican Spirits in Revolt 1
Part I The Soul of a Republic
1 Free Democrats to the Republicans: Radical Spiritualists and the Antislavery Insurgency 23
2 The Mystical Union: The Republican Medium of the National Destiny 44
3 Father Abraham: President Lincoln and the Spirit of the Union 65
Part II The Promise of a Republic
4 Liberty: Toward a Rational Spirit of Freedom 89
5 Equality: Race and Gender 106
6 Fraternity: Reconstructing a Movement and the Nation 125
Epilogue Long Shadows: The Legacies of Civil War-Era Spiritualism 145
Notes 161
Index 217