 Oh dear, we have a very small crowd this afternoon, and it seems very silly to introduce Rob Cox to you, because you all know him, and you've already been chatting with him. But I should say he is head of Special Elections and University Archives at the University of Massachusetts Library. And as you all know, he has very broad interests across the sciences and humanities. He's written a number of books, including my favorite New England High, History under a crust that's a classic. And we're looking forward to his talk today, on spiritualism and the Connecticut River Valley. So welcome. Thank you for doing this today. Thanks for having me. I've been thinking an awful lot, like a lot of people, about where the country is right now and the unbelievable division that I see every day in every direction. And that pain that people obviously feel, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, there is a great deal of pain. And the sense of division, the sense that there is a civil war that's imminent, a sense that there is strife and danger, and peril for the nation, as well as for the division. That makes a difference. And that is a good entry to spiritualism. Because in the 1840s and 50s, when the spiritualism first came together in what they call modern spiritualism, the modern form of spiritualism, the country was probably even more divided than it is now. We had a very staunch concern of the South that was investing in slavery in a very aggressive way. And they were expansionists. We had an aggressive North who not necessarily invested in anti-slavery, but were certainly not aligned with the pro-slavery South. And there were a very small minority of people North and to a lesser degree in the South who opposed slavery in every form. When you think about African-Americans in the mix, there was a three million who were enslaved and it would seem pretty obvious, would say, were opposed to slavery. The feeling that the nation was falling apart, the nation was falling apart, and all sorts of different grounds was pervasive in the 1840s and 50s. You had people who were sure that the North and South split would lead to civil war, which of course it did. You had people who felt very strongly that the racial divide was tearing apart the country. And sure enough, it was. You had people who were investing the idea that gender was a split along which the nation would founder. All of these were absolutely universal in the country in the 1840s and 1850s. And you couldn't go a day then, any more than you can now, without the sense that this country was falling apart, falling into two, falling into five, falling into 10. It didn't matter how many, it was falling apart. So here's the country, and I think this is 1830s or something like that. I can't remember exactly when this map is, 1820s or something. But you can see the country at this period of time splitting North, South, West as three different points. And there are a variety of points in which there were particular flashes. Out here in the Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska area in the 1850s, we have a flash point where Southerners want to expand with slavery, northerners want to expand without. And we had both Northerners from New England moving into Kansas to populate it to make it a free state. Southerners moving in from Missouri and from elsewhere in the South to make it a slave state. And ultimately, the politicians did nothing but compromise one after another, if you want to call it compromise, which meant more often not knuckling under to the slave power in the sense that New Englanders thought of it in the 1840s and 1850s. So there is another division line that doesn't get talked about in the early as much for a variety of reasons. This is because contemporary politics aside, religion has always been viewed as one of those healing parts of American society. The 1840s, 1850s is sort of the tail end of what we call the second grade awakening. A period from roughly 1800, depending on where you were into the 1840s and 50s, in which America was swept repeatedly over and over and over again by evangelical revivals north and south. The upstate of New York, the area from Buffalo to Syracuse became known as the Burndover District because the flames of evangelical revivals swept over repeatedly one after another, sort of like Northern California, my hometown. But the way it's usually thought of is that it was a unifying force for a lot of Americans. Protestants, we were a largely Protestant country. A lot of people joined the church and they'll say as many as two thirds of Americans in this antebellum period were members of a church. What they don't really say is that that means that at least one third of Americans had the opportunity to join the church and said no. And of the two thirds who did join the church, many of them were itinerant. They moved from one faith to another. We have a former university speaker of all, probably mentioned again named James Peebles, who had grown up, I can't remember the exact order of things for him unfortunately, but he'd grown up, I think it was a Presbyterian, maybe he was a congregationalist, but he'd gotten swept up by a Methodist revival and joined the Methodist. Then the Presbyterians came down and they hid him, then the universals came down and he says he went through one after another and each revival, the preacher would say, we're the only path to having, we're the only ones you have the true knowledge. That's when we come along, we're the only ones with a true path to having, they're not third when we come. And Peebles ultimately concluded that they can't all be right, so they must all be wrong. That was his logic. But evangelical religion, as much as it drew small clusters and communities, even large clusters and communities together, was an enormously divisive force in the 1840s and 1850s. Didn't matter where you stood on the line, sectarian boundaries became very sharp and very aggressively controlled. And there was, which not enough historians talk about, there was an aggressive anti-clerical and anti-religious streak in America in the 1840s and 1850s, largely as a result. Now into this mix, in upstate New York and the heart of the Burndover district, in a small town called Hidesfields or southeast of Rochester. Sometime in the winter of 1847, 1848, you had these three sisters, Kate Margaret Fox and Lena Fox, who were living in a very small building. The building itself doesn't stand in the lower, but the foundation does, and they've turned it sort of marked it over. You can build the building over, you can go and see the foundation. It's about the size of this room here. But the Fox sisters, young girls, 12, 13 years old at the time, the Kate Margaret. Discovered during that winter of 1847, 1848, that they could hear noises coming from various parts of the houses, little racking noises like that on the roof, on the floor, on the walls. And they discovered that they could interact with these noises. They immediately accused of making up the noises, but they said, no, we can make the noises come wherever they come. They can, you know, underneath us, they can come over there, they can come in this room, they can make these noises. And these noises, they recognized, not only could come when they asked, but they could respond to questions. Sometime around February, March, 1848, they discovered that if I asked a question, I could ask a yes-no question, say not wrap once for yes, wrap two for no. So they could ask yes-no questions. And this began a conversation that evolved eventually into a wrapping alphabet that was remarkably like Morse code. They often called it a celestial telegraph, or the spiritual telegraph, because it worked along the same principles. They thought there was some sort of electrical force in nature that could be mobilized to communicate between these unseen entities and the living. The Fox sisters, these little young girls, 12, 13 years old, recognized that we could ask questions, let's figure out what this force is and make the long story short sometime in March, end of March, 1848, they discovered that the spirits themselves, the spirits of once living beings who lived in that house were attempting to communicate with these young girls who were living in this house. That hit like a storm. The girls were relatively believable because they were so young and these phenomena were witnessed by dozens and dozens and dozens of people. They were trying and tested again and again and again. The community, the local community first began to flock to them and then people from all around the region began to come to the Fox sisters house and attempt to communicate with the dead. This was an establishment of a spiritual telegraph connecting the living to the dead. They said, if you look, ultimately you say, if you look biblically, you can see the dead and living speaking back about Bible days. And we'd simply lost the ability, but now with modern technologies and this new force, we have reestablished the line so that we can begin to communicate again. We're in a new dispensation. And this should resonate with somebody who's in a world that's falling apart. A new dispensation says something to those people for whom it's falling apart. They became so popular that ultimately they were whisked up to Rochester, so they spoke to Corinthian Hall where people like Frederick Douglass and the great suffragettes of the day, the women's suffrage movement speakers were known to Wisconsin. They were seen by hundreds and hundreds of people up there. They were taken off to Buffalo, created in front of a group of doctors who tested them. The doctors said, oh, the Fox sisters are just frauds. All they're doing is cracking the joints in their knuckles or their toes or their knees to make these noises. But the Fox sisters persisted, they kept making these noises and everywhere they went, they drew huge, huge crowds. Now they weren't the only ones. And it's important to remember that the Fox sisters were not the only ones who began to communicate with spirits. As soon as they began commuting, you see all across the Burrindoba District, all across this area of, well, all across the nation where people had been embedded in the spiritual hot house, the second grade awakening. You begin to see other people trying to make an effort to communicate with spirits using whatever form they could. Wrapping was the first and most abundant technology in the 1840s, 1850s. But it gradually spread out so that you see a variety of ways of attempting to communicate. These phenomenal ability to find new and novel ways of speaking from the living to the dead. You see, on the one hand, some spiritualists who begin to do table tipping and chair tipping. You'll see asking questions and having the table rise or fall with to respond to the question. Table tipping became a very common thing. Tables would lift off the floor in response to spiritual questions. You begin to see people taking up more or less direct community with spirits, having the spirits speak through them. So you have, on the one hand, someone who will be invested with the spirit who will speak through them in a trance-like state. You have others like James V. Mansfield, one of my very favorite spirits, who's called himself the spiritual postmaster. And Mansfield picked up sometime 1853, 1852, 1854, one of that period of time. This guy already had the ability to hold seal letters to his forehead or anything that was hidden from view. He could pull out his forehead and read spiritually with the aid of spirits. So it's very far from the spirit, the spirits of the Fox sisters communicating within this very mechanical way. He's using sort of psychic vision to do this. And in the 1840s and 1850s, that didn't seem so crazy because spiritualism was derided at the time as being nothing more than an expression of natural phenomena that we all know to be true, like clairvoyance, the ability to read other people's minds. Scientists today believe that you can commune spiritually, think spiritually, connect mentally between individuals. And they said, there's no spirits here, what people are doing, these naive young girls are communing somehow psychically with their subjects. James Mansfield is not actually using spirits to read the letter, somehow he's connecting in his mind to these people. We have other things like a machine here devised by Robert Hare, who was America's greatest bench chemist at the time. He was an eminent scientist, very late in his career in the early 1850s when he discovered spiritual communication and he devised this sort of wheel-like device in which you could ask questions and you could see their letters here would spell out the answer. Hare actually got them a lot of flack for doing this. He was an august member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a very distinguished scientist, a very high-profile scientist. As soon as he began to speak out of a spiritualist, fellow scientist said, hey Bob, shut up. Don't make us all look bad, but he persisted and was drummed out of the Triple A.S. as a result of his spiritualist activity. There was a biography written of Hare, only one really that's come to this date, written around the turn of the century, and they simply refused to mention Robert Hare's spiritualist episode in life. They talk about his chemistry and everything else in life, but not about his spiritual use of view as being sort of embarrassing. And it's an indication at the time that spiritualism is a controversy. Now, we were talking before about spiritualism today and saying you don't see much of it. Well, in the 1850s you would have seen a lot because it was considered to be one of the fastest growing religious-like movements of the day. It was probably the fastest growing religion in America, if you call it a religion, in the 1850s and probably in the 1860s. The estimates of the number of people who believe are anywhere between three million and 11 billion. And the population of the US at the time is 33 million, 35 million at that range. So, depending on who you believe, it's 10% to 30% of the country who are believers. The problem is that what I describe as spiritualism is not a central tenant, there's no church, there's no central set of beliefs, it's a set of practices at this point. And the practices you can believe in while being a good Unitarian, a good Universalist, a good Congregationalist. You can say, this is real. And it wouldn't affect your belief unless you were an ultra-Orthodox person who felt that anything that goes outside what is written in our faith is a problem. So the numbers vary widely because nobody knows what a spiritualist was unless you said, I'm a spiritualist. It nevertheless got attacked. It got attacked from the folks who were very much in the materialist mode. Spiritualism stands apart from materialism. Most scientists, unlike here, viewed these phenomena as being unproved and unprovable. It was very fiercely attacked by Orthodox religious folks. Virtually every denomination attacked it as either being a fraud foisted upon the people, as being real and diabolical, or as being real and a force of nature, but nothing spiritual whatsoever. So spiritualism carried controversy but grew very, very rapidly. Come back in a second to a little bit more of that. This is a little bit later in the development of the spiritual. We see the ploschette, which is more or less like a modern Ouija board, and this tie in the, really as early as the 1850s, into other phenomena. It's not just spirits, but you can channel energies. You can channel forces in spiritualism. This comes out of an area in spiritualism that I think is what makes spiritualism spiritualism. A lot of folks talk about spiritualism, point to the Fox sisters and point to the phenomenal aspects of it, this ability to communicate and saying, oh my gosh, how wonderful it is that people could find solace by communicating with the dead loved ones. And sure enough, that's most of who communicate. You would go to a seance, you would hear from your dead aunt or your grandmother or your son perhaps who had died out at sea. And you can communicate and find some solace. And there's enough evidence to suggest some people did find solace in these after-death communications. But that's not what spiritualism is really about to most of the people at the time. Phenomenal were only one piece of spiritualism. The other part, which I typically call the philosophical part, goes back to this guy, A.J. Davis, Andrew Jackson Davis. He is not the landscape architect down there, Andrew Jackson Davis, but a spiritualist himself before there were spiritualism. Back in the main 1840s, three to five years before the Fox sisters, he was bumming around the Hudson River Valley and walked on to an itinerant mesmerist. Mesmerism was something that a lot of people believed in at the time. In the 1850s, they believed that you could manipulate the natural forces that link bodies and funnel energies to cure or to anesthetize people. There were physicians in India who were conducting surgery under mesmeric induced trance. You had people who were doing this as a popular entertainment. Who were showing what it's like to mesmerize or today would say hypnotize an audience member. And Davis was one of these guys who walked on to a itinerant mesmerist, found that he was a great mesmeric subject and that when he went into trance, he saw the world in a very different way. The first time you went to a trance at a young age, and I don't remember exactly how old he was in 1844 or 1845, he began to see that the world was connected by these very powerful forces. Again, think back about a world that's falling apart in the United States. He's saying there are powerful forces that are binding the universe together. The forces that he saw, what literally saw, operated was primarily the force of sympathy. And sympathy in the 1840s and 1850s is the same word sympathy we use today, but it had some different meanings. Today, you think of sympathy as being this kind of thing that you feel a little bit of commonality with someone else that feel a little bit of connection to them. In the 1840s and 1850s, they were drawing on a much older set of ideas about sympathy. They go back to the 17th century, but also to the 18th century, thinkers like Adam Smith and David Heen. Adam Smith, I want to make my favorite guys. He's not Adam Smith who he's often portrayed. Give him a break. But Adam Smith believed that sympathy was a natural innate force that all humans shared. And sympathy was this unseen bond that we establish one with one another when we interact in life. You can think about it in an economic sense, and Smith did think about it in an economic sense. When I exchange money with someone, when I buy goods, what I'm doing is setting up a relationship where an exchange leads to the possibility of future exchanges. Think about it in an emotional level. When you interact with somebody on a day-to-day basis, you develop these bonds that persist and are drawn on them. He says, this is the power, the force of sympathy in operation. He says, if you want to see sympathy in its purest form, go to a public execution. He says, when you see the victim hanged in front of the crowd, you drop on the rope and sway left and right. And what do you see when you look at the crowd? The crowd sways with the body left and right. The dancer on the slack rope is his raise for the hanged man, in that case. He says, that's the power of sympathy. The crowd looking at this body out there, for whom they often don't know, they have no connection with. But they feel this innate connection to the person because we're all humans, we're all in these day-to-day interactions. Smith imagined the nation itself as coming together because the bonds of sympathy were what connected us. Other nations fall apart, are outsiders of sympathy, they form it. Now, I'm going at some length because Davis, this guy who's a schlub like me, walking around getting mesmerized, sees these forces in physical form operating. And what comes to pass over the next few years is his ideas about these physical forces where he sees all around us. And these ideas that the Fox sisters were tripping onto in their own way about communicating with each other. He says, what better evidence is there of the power of sympathy than it can heal every divide in the world? And how powerful is it? It can heal the greatest divide of all, which is the divided death. Sympathy is so powerful that sympathetic bonds between two living people persist after one of those people dies. The spirits can come back and speak to us because we have strong bonds with them. We don't speak to average spirits. You speak to somebody you know and love, your brother, your sister, your father, your mother, your grandparents. That's the mechanism that they use to come back. It can overcome even death. Now, this view of the world is deeply embedded in mesmerism, this idea that you can channel and control these forces that draw people together. Fits into Davis' view of the world. He sees literally spirits rising and falling, coming and going on these sympathetic bonds. Mesmerists activate these sympathetic bonds. In the 1850s, one of the reasons spirits lived in his pocket is because it becomes a way in which Americans, average Americans, you and me, sitting in a crowd watching something maybe where I'm not getting a spirit message, but I'm simply watching other people receiving new messages. See the power of sympathy before the power to heal wounds, to cure divides that are splitting divided politics. And it's more than just that because it's an active thing, drawing on the mesmeric background. You can actively manipulate these forces to heal the country around them. What spirits in the 1850 are known for doing is acting in a social manner, acting to change society for the better. Spiritualists were deeply, deeply involved in abolitionism, in women's rights movement, in dress reform, and I could go down one after another after another. All these movements, they're at Skullistan because these are movements in which people are attempting to actively intervene in American culture to change society for the better. And if you look down the list of the best known abolitionists from Harriet Tubman to William Lloyd Garrison, most of them have interest in spiritualism or were actively spiritualists. The Grimke sisters became spiritualists. Garrison and William Phillips, I'm not so sure about, but down the list, you'll see one after another who are spiritualists. Women's rights movement, it's the same thing. Anne Brody, whom I think is wrong in many, many ways in her book, even though it's a very important pioneering book, she says, not every feminist was a spiritualist, but every spiritualist was a feminist, is her phrase for it. And it's probably relatively close to being accurate because spiritualists believe that you can act to cure society around you. Now, in Massachusetts, we have another little backstory that starts to come into play here. There's this idea about, well, I'll call them sleeping preachers. Natural trance that you see breaking out all around us, and these are two cases that I'm familiar with, Rachel Baker and Jane Ryder. Rachel Baker is the earliest, the earlier of the two. She is the daughter of one of the Shea's rebels. She was born in Pelham, Mass, and as a young girl in her early teens, she moved with her father out to New York State and settled in an area where a lot of revolutionary veterans settled in that state of New York. And around 1812 or so, she began to wake up in the middle of the night. I shouldn't say wake up, but to sit up in the middle of the night and begin to preach. She's a simple country girl, but she would sit, bolt up right in bed, stare forward to all appearances, still asleep, and begin to preach full out and out sermons. This became pretty much a phenomenon. People wanted to see the sleeping preacher and Rachel Baker, so she was dragged down in New York City and put up in a room where August members of the faculty at New York University and Columbia University would come and visit her, and theologians would come and debate her on theological topics, and they recorded her sermons and her interactions with these learned settle all around here. Published a couple different editions of this book, which you can find around in Nazi for Common, with Rachel Baker in this weird phenomenon where this otherwise quiet country girl was becoming an intellectual phenomenon. Her sermons were said to be beautiful and deep and rich and theologically based, even though they were not necessarily entirely orthodox. And Baker sort of disappears from view in around 1815, and she died a few years later, Baker is one of these people who comes to light and saying this average person who's invested with some spiritual power out of this trans-like state. Jane Ryder was from Springfield Pass, just down the road here. And Jane in the 1830s was a servant girl in the home of a local sort of petty bourgeoisie. He came down one night, her master came down one night, and I'm forgetting his name, I'm forcing it right now, but he came down in a pitch dark at night to discover that she was doing chores in her sleep. And he began to experiment with it, and he realized that she could do a lot of remarkable things like thread a needle in the pitch dark. She could do dishes and put away silverware and everything without breaking anything, just as if it was perfectly awake, but her eyes closed. He discovered in others at the same time, I'll mingle together a few different cases here, because there's a woman named Lorena Brackett in Providence, and there's several of these others who at this time break out with this odd ability to see and do things in the dark in the middle of the night. Lorena Brackett could again thread needles and so forth, but she could also travel in her sleep. She was investigated right around the same time as Jane Ryder and discovered that she could, while sitting in Providence, imagine a trip by steamboat into New York City, and she could describe landing at Castle Garden and working her way up the street. And her interrogator who lived in New York City said, well, why don't you walk into my house? And she says, I walk up the street and I see your house. It's a narrow alley, I'll walk in there and I walk in and I see the following people who say, that's not my house. She begins to describe it and he realizes, actually she's describing his neighbor's house. And he says, you went into the wrong house. So she says, oh, go out, go into your house. She walks in, describes the paintings on the walls, the books on the shelves, and the papers that are tucked away in drawers for this guy. Jane Ryder is this woman who, well, one of these people who finds that you could actually read books by blindfolding them, putting a red guy over their eyes and wrapping it around and have them read books. They could tell color by touch. They could hear sound using non-auditory senses. All of this is the background to spiritualists. So when spiritualists come along in the 1840s, these idea that there are unseen forces that you can manipulate, unseen forces that lead to these remarkable sensory abilities, all come into play, this philosophical idea about how we can manage these forces, this phenomenal idea about how we can come into contact with the dead on a regular basis, all come together. By the 1860s, we begin to see other technologies entering the spirit realm. On the right here is a photograph that's in my collection of William Mumler, who was the first spirit photographer or one of the first two. He and Mrs. Stewart were bumming around in Boston in 1862 when learning the art of photography. He was a jewelry engraver. She was a hair jewelry manufacturer. And they began taking photographs and when they took the photographs of living people, they discovered that these ghost-like figures appeared in the back. And when he asked the living sinners, what's going on here, they said, that's my uncle, that's my aunt, that's my wife. All these spiritual things came to pass. This is a photograph of Mumler's from a slightly later period, probably not 1870 or so, in which you see a photograph of somebody who is presumably still alive, but not present, with three deceased around him. It's like the ultimate statement of our photography as well, isn't it? That's another story. Mumler was joined by others, but Mumler's ideas hit like a ton of bricks in the US. We had people who wanted to believe this to be true. You had spiritualists who said, this is proof of his unseen forces and unseen beings, just like we've said all along. James Mansfield in 1863, 1862, 1863, 1864 was working out San Francisco. And when he first heard of this, a spirit postmaster said, this is proof of what we've helped. Please send me photographs of Mumler so I can see them myself. He was originally from Boston, Mummers from Boston, so he got friends to gather some of these photos sent them out to him. Well, they arrived, what's the interesting? He said, Mumler, sorry, Mansfield began to look at these photos and to inquire who was William Mumler. He passed the photos around there, he came a little bit of a sensation. They trucked from San Francisco up to Sacramento and all around, people very interested in getting very excited by the spirit photos. But Mansfield himself turned the other direction. He said, who is Mumler? Mumler is not a spiritualist. Mumler is someone who's simply saying he's capturing spirits. And within six months or so, Mansfield concluded that Mumler has to be a fraud because he's not a spiritualist. He's not part of our sympathetic community. He's not the part of this group where we have bonds and expectations. What he's doing is sitting outside our community to speak to our community for profit. The other spiritualist William Denton here is a guy from Eastern Massachusetts, from Wellesley who communed with spirits through his wife who did geological excursions using spiritualism to pull the fossil and to read the history of the earth through that fossil. Josiah Gridley in Southampton, just down the road from us here, just down the road from where I live, discovered spirits in the 1850s and got involved in writing his own book, Astounding Facts from the Spirit World, which is still around where there's a full-out plate which shows the spirit world, all the spheres of the spirit having to connect. Up in Lake Pleasant, in the 1870s, you had established a spirit summer camp called Lake, now the town of the village, pardon me, of Lake Pleasant, in the town of Montague. The Independent Order of Scalpers is a community, it's a club that was formed before the turn of the century in Lake Pleasant. It is still around, the clubhouse is still around, I don't think they parade around in full Indian yarn any longer, but they are still called the Independent Order of Scalpers as far as I know. And this club here is named after this idea that this communion that we have with spirits is more natural for the simpler people in the world, Indians. And this idea that we can be connected to them is entrenched in spiritualism already in the 1850s. Now, it points to the big issue for me is spiritualism growing rapidly as this force that heals humanity. They're drawing on ideas about Indians. They're also drawing on ideas about Africans. They view race as being one of the key dividing factors in American culture. They see slavery and the slave power as being dangerous to the nation and that we can overcome these racial divisions using spirit powers, talking to spirits, mobilizing them, and so forth. And they make real effort students. They say it was deeply popular in abolitionist circles. What should be obvious is that when you do that, you recognize that if it were so popular and so powerful that you should see bodies of African Americans in the same room. And in fact, when you begin to look for that, you find, yes, pockets, so general truth, being one of them who adopted spiritual beliefs. But there are many, many others who try it out and determine it's not for us. One of the things I discovered that I found very interesting is that spiritualism in the South seems to have been much, much less popular than in North. It was present, but not anywhere near as popular. In part, spiritualism gets associated with these progressive ideas about ending slavery, which doesn't make it popular, it doesn't endear it in the South. But you do find pockets in the South where spiritualism takes on. And one of them is in New Orleans. And in New Orleans, starting in the mid-1850s, later 1850s, you see gathering a little group of what were called free-colored New Orleans, French-speaking people of mixed race who were free, not enslaved. They occupied a middle rung in the social hierarchy in New Orleans, with enslaved people being at the bottom, with free white people, especially wealthy white people, above them. The free-colored Creole New Orleans sat somewhere in the middle. And they adopted spiritualism fiercely. They found in it the promise of a world that would overcome slavery, that would overcome racial animosity. And what happens along comes the Civil War. And the Civil War, in case you haven't recognized recently, was won by the South. It was won by the South over a long period of time, but it was won by the South. And what do I say that slavery ended but slave thinking did not end. Slave thinking was not attacked. The idea of dominance of one race over another persisted, even though we lost half a million lives scattered across the countryside, all over the South and the Eastern, Eastern coast. Racial thinking continued unchecked through the Civil War. The idea that we could overcome the world, all the divisions of the world using sympathy, runs up against this reality, runs up against a half million dead in a nation of 33 million. It runs up against the idea that racial animosity, which is behind slavery in part, or tied deeply into slavery, doesn't end. And at the end of the Civil War, many of the abolitionists, many of the advanced progressive thinkers of the day turned away and said, we won. Spears was said, what do we have here? We have this idea of sympathy that we could overcome the boundaries and clearly it did not. We have a half million dead. The dead didn't seek solace through spiritual, spiritual to saw the death of their ideas in those half million dead around the country. And they saw around them a country, north and south, that began to coalesce, a white country that began to coalesce around ideas of white supremacy. That had always been there, but came in a new force after the Civil War. So spirituals begins to move away from it and change very, very quickly. This is, I can't each your own, some extra plasm here. But what happens is spirituals turn away from the philosophical side. The idea that we can mobilize natural forces, the Yale Society, and we end up instead in a world in which all we have are phenomena. We can contact the dead, but it doesn't have a meaning anymore. Spirituals remains popular into the 20th century. Lake Pleasant starts in the 1870s and it continues, it sort of reaches an apex. The turn of the century is declined. There is still, if you go to Lake Pleasant today, the spirituals temple there and the post office right across from it. And if you look at the top of the post office, there's a little bit of cupola which, by understanding, was a seance room. There are generations of spirituals that live at Lake Pleasant and who still do live at Lake Pleasant. But spirituals have lost its philosophical core. It's the philosophical compass where it lost the idea that we could mobilize natural forces to heal society. There are still spirituals today who believe that. But more often than not, we have this question of what is the spirituals today? Well, there are lots of spirituals today and many of them believe in the core idea that we can still communicate with the dead. If you ask, how many people go to spirituals churches and the number is very small? But if you ask, how many have spirituals' beliefs? The number is enormous. A third to a quarter, a third to half of the nation believe in ghosts and spirit communication or some of these other things that are tied in here. What we don't have is that philosophical core about what it means to believe in that. So that's my sad story. Wow. So if you have any questions, it'd be great to take a few minutes further. That's my picture. That's my picture? It's my cap. It's my cap. Where's the hat? Somebody next way. Have people drawn a connection between the Fox sisters as young girls with experiences and the Salem witches? Yes, spirituals did that. There's a book by Massachusetts guy, Alan Putnam, where he's very explicit about that. There's a line of writing in spiritual literature in the 19th century that these phenomena that we believe in are natural, not the sense that they are not spiritual, but they are innate to humanity. And then we see them cropping out in biblical times, but we see them also cropping out in episodes like in the city of witchcraft trial. And it was simply misunderstood and went to pathological ends in that case. But the idea that we could draw back on these historical antecedents to prove that spirit communication is a common fact of life are very present there. So yeah, there were a number of attempts to tie in. It's also not just Salem, but you could go almost anything where you could think of where there's these prophetic outbursts are also tied in. And they usually tried to simply put into this long history that reads up to the modern era when we discovered new technologies for communication that opens up the world. Before talking about New Orleans era mentioned, you mentioned that a lot of African-Americans would at least begin to explore the messiah of the spiritual symbols of them or some of the narratives and reasons behind that. There is, I remember reading some letters that it was Frederick Douglass and Wayne Cooper Nell. They were one Frederick Douglass great abolitionist and Wayne Cooper Nell. And to sort of encapsulate them, they're certainly willing to go to a Salem's table and to experience and see what's going on. But like a lot of spirituals, they have a very rational side to them and they look and they try to understand what am I seeing, what am I feeling, what am I getting out of this experience? While you see a lot of white people seeing the optimism and the hope in it, my reading of it is that a lot of people, a lot of African-Americans, not necessarily enslaved people because that's a different world and I think we don't know very much about that world, but free black Americans at the time. Going to a Salem's table, they see this phenomenon, they might have hope that it could be true, but they also have a certain degree of suspicion about the idea that mobilizing these unseen natural forces are gonna heal the world. It really takes a little bit of extra oof to believe that, to walk away from the table and say, yeah, this is gonna happen. And so Douglas and Nell are non-committal about it. The group up in Rochester, the Fox sisters tell him, one of the first groups who ties in is a group around Isaac and Amy Post who were big site Quakers who moved up there and maybe Isaac Post becomes a medium very early on and begins communicating with spirits. He's an abolitionist tied into large, abolitionist networks and people look at it as being positive and hopeful, but nevertheless a little bit of reticence about buying into the whole thing. In New Orleans, it doesn't appear to be the enslaved class or the lower class African population in Louisiana, but this middle zone of people who are mixed race and have relatively privileged states who buy into it. And I think I don't wanna get to a psychological reading of it, but you understand that their social position is different and has different potentiality than somebody who's really at the bottom of the room. And what happens during the Civil War in New Orleans is that three-fold structure of racial classification in New Orleans collapses. And you end up with a binary where you're either white or if you have any black in you, you're black. And so you see these optimistic messages in the 1850s and the 1860s. And if I were to go into it in greater life in the 1850s, there's this optimism. When the Union forces in vain take over New Orleans in 1862, you see this moment in which you see these three black New Orleans residents sing solidarity with the black New Orleans residents, the people they view as full-race black residents. But when the whites take over in New Orleans again, when the Confederacy wins in 1866, there's an incredible violence taken on the part of southern reconstructions who want to reconstruct the South again. And their force, the forcing is liberal guns and violence. Taking over the government locally, you begin to see these people who are in the middle, who are now at the bottom of the room, looking up and saying, the only possible solution we have is in the afterlife, not this life. So they change from this moment where they see a potential to a moment in which they see solidarity with other people of color to this ultimate goal, ultimate end of looking for justice only in the afterlife. Is there any record of Roman Catholicism's reaction in this country because they have that European record of apparitions? Yeah, there is less than you would think but there is some. And where you see Roman Catholic influences in New Orleans, a lot of those free black New Orleans spiritualists came out of a Roman Catholic background, or at least came through a Roman Catholic background. They have an orthodoxy, but on the other hand, they're used to seeing apparitions. Yeah, spiritualism was absolutely reviled by Roman Catholic authorities. And usually, as I said, there are different ways to attack spiritualism. One of which is it's fraud. Nobody believes in stuff. And materialism, we can get at that. Another is to say that the forces are real but natural. A third that is very often taken by orthodox Christians, including most Catholics, is that these things that they were seeing are real but they're diabolical. So the community that we're seeing is a real thing. They just misunderstood thinking that it's the spirits of their brothers and sisters and in fact, it's diabolical spirits speaking through them. Yeah, in Europe, they accepted these apparitions as being real. The hierarchy did. It's the issue isn't whether it's an apparition or not because you can buy that, but it's what you're seeing. So when it comes to the church, it's a revelation from God. When it comes outside the church, it's a revelation from the devil. And so they're very fierce about patrolling the lines and they're saying these people who are untutored and not Catholic in many cases and lower class in many cases are not the kind of people who would be manifesting divine unless the church acknowledges it. And that's the true or false dichotomy that doesn't leave space for people who have unusual capability. It's interesting, I asked whether there had been to a seance before, I'll tell you my story. It was, there's a community like Pleasant North here which is a spiritual community, a summer community. There's also an even bigger one and a little bit more continuity of the place in West New York called Lillydale. And I had been to Lillydale beforehand and I initially had just rejected going through a seance or a religious service, religious spiritual service because I didn't want to get trapped into thinking like modern spiritualists when I'm thinking about 19th century spiritualists. But at this point I was getting late in the game in terms of my writing of the book. And I was traveling with my wife from, I think we were in Vermont originally and coming across New York, middle of the day and we were approaching Lillydale and I said, hey, we're approaching Lillydale and we want to stop in. So sure, so we pull off the highway, we drive in and there's a gate there and they hand you the card for the day saying what's going on. And I looked down and it was, we were there, let's say it was 1.45 and I noticed that at two o'clock there's a spiritualist church service being held in a building because I've been to Lillydale once before even the building was, I said, let's go. And so we drive in and we walk in at about three minutes before the service begins. And I thought, this'll be interesting, I'll get to experience it. Let's sit way in the back and just shut up and observe. And so we did that. And I probably spelt like a goat because we'd been on the road for a few days and it was hot and dirty and all this kind of stuff. But the service started and there were three people up on stage. A woman who was, I'll call her the emcee who was introducing the man who was the minister and the man who was the clerk or the woman who was the clairvoyant for the day. And she sat down, the minister got up, there was a little bit organ playing like in the Protestant service. He gave a very boring sermon, I thought, very generic. It didn't really strike me as anything you wouldn't hear in half the churches in the country on an even day. But then the clairvoyant came up and the clairvoyant standing literally on a stage looking at the crowd, about 30 of us in the crowd, 40 of us in the crowd. And she says, I see spirits all around today who want to communicate. If I point to you and I ask, may I approach you, meaning may I ask a question of you, please speak up, say yes or no clearly so I can establish a good connection with the spirit who wants to communicate. And so she points to the first question. She says, may I approach? Yes. I see a spirit behind you who is rallying around the kitchen. She's got dark hair, she's short, she's in the kitchen, rallying pots and pans, always like to be cooking. Is this makes sense to you? Yes, yes. And I'm thinking, you know, well, I'm very dispassionate. I'm thinking, well, you know, it's fairly generic. There's nothing really there. She speaks Italian, is that right? That's my grandmother, that's my grandmother. But I can see people really responding to this stuff and see it's very generic. She knows, I see, may I approach, yes. I see a man standing, his left leg is about three inches short and goes right leg and he walks with a pronounced limp. I see an uncle in the spirit world. Yes, that's my uncle. But well, you know, that's interesting. Couple people she approaches are a little bit more resistant. Some are seemingly euphoric, but you know, on the other end. And she's winding up and she looks and points at me. She says, may I approach you? Yeah. And I say, if you want to destroy all academic credibility, yes, please do. But I said, yes. And she says, this is odd. I see two people behind you, is your grandfather in the spirit world. And I say, yes. She says, I know one of them is your grandfather. The other one is standing right behind your grandfather. And I don't know who he is. Robert S. Cox VI, my grandfather was the fourth and you know, the third and fourth. So I thought, well, that's interesting. So she says, your grandfather describes you at work. And at the time, I was a manuscript curator at the Clements Library University of Michigan. And my office was a big square room with the counter all around and bookcases and so forth. And she says, your grandfather describes you. He sees you sitting in your office at a surface that goes all around. And it's covered with books and papers and manuscripts all around you. That's odd because I'm a manuscript. She's manuscripts and books and papers. This is a real rat's nest. And I said, yeah, that's my office, exactly. And she said, your grandfather, she said a couple of things that I don't really remember. She says, eventually it gets into this. Your grandfather says, oh, don't worry. The fall, blah, blah, blah, you're gonna eat all better. Whatever, very generic. And then she says, now, I don't understand this part at all, but your grandfather also wants me to show you standing behind a podium lecturing to a large crowd. You have a blue aura around your throat. I don't know what this means, but at the time I was teaching the course every semester to 300 students where I had to stand behind a podium and lecture and that's very strange. And she finished up and I'm processing all this and as she ends up, my life turns, and she says, you wanna go talk to her? And they said, no. And she said, neither do I. And you left. What was interesting about it to me, especially in retrospect, is that I'm in the crowd, I'm trying to be as passionate and I sort of am, I'm not easily moved by things. But when somebody's speaking to you and delivering these words, whatever those words are, there is a sense of connection that comes out of it and a sense of power that carries through those words can affect you even if you are skeptical about it. And it's a very strange experience and I've had many people I've talked to over the years since then who've had experiences that are much more profound and much more moving than that, but it's something that has a power to you. And if you imagine being in the 1850s where this new phenomenon comes along and you are searching for a way of living in the world and here's this set of ideas and practices that are presented to you that come together in this package, you can imagine how powerful it was and that was somebody that asked me how I got involved with this. Well, it was reading literally one letter from one spirit just in the 1880s, writing to another who we hadn't seen in many, many years about their experiences in the 1850s. And it begins the letter by saying, you and I know that we're laughed at and we're vile by the word around us because of our beliefs, but you and I know how powerful those experiences were all those many years ago. And it goes on, he describes, since that first night when we sat and we were laughing and loving all night long and listening to the spirit invest itself in my body and take control of my throat and wage my time at will. Since that is an experience that will never live down and I cannot deny the reality I experience and live in the belief as long as we live and even after. So you remember that and you say, the way historians write about spirits and Brody and many others since who copied her, write about spirits as being this way that people who are subordinate society, who are in the lower rungs of society, particularly women and lower status men, find in spirits the ability to speak publicly about things they could not speak in usual cases because here they say, it's not me, this spirit speaking through me, making rapid noises and cradles. Yeah, right, that's a spoiler. But I find that to be ridiculous at the end of the day because the experience with people in the crowd is not listening to somebody saying, women's land or, you know, end race. The experience is this powerful emotion that you get by drawing into something that is so much larger and that has so much human power in a social sense. So what are the chances now that spiritualism will revive now that we're in this mix? I, you know, the problem is that the philosophical base, the cultural basis for believing is so gone that it's difficult. Now I'm taking a sabbatical next semester to work on the post-World War II period where that's specifically my question is, why do we see spiritualism coming back during that time? And there are particular reasons dealing with the nature of, to put it really crudely and very simply, if you look at death in 1939, what do you have? You have, everybody's affected by death. You have the example of the First World War where we have death on a mechanical fashion. But after World War II, where you have the Holocaust and the nuclear bomb, we have death on an unimaginable scale. And so there are real powerful motives for beginning to reassess what it means to be dead and to think about that. And that has something to do with it. But there's a lot of other things that are going on culturally at the same time, including a very aggressive evangelical Christianity that begins to assert itself after the Second World War in a very effective fashion and instilling itself in the government. You know, we have, in God we trust in 1954, not just because the civil rights movement, but largely because of that. And because of other reasons as well. A lot of things are coming together at that period of time. Today, almost everything we've been drained out of this optimism, unfortunately, and this idea that we can cure society. I think we're now at a moment where the other question is, if things fall apart, which way does it fall apart? Whoa, sorry.