While earlier already we presented an extensive case study of how Spiritualism developed in Europe once it became renamed Spiritism in France (and its esoteric environment), here we will show its typical N. American development.

So for example, in 1857, Abraham Pierce announced in print that he was a medium. According to his autobiography, published under the audacious title The Revelator, he and a few of his mends had been invited to a neighbor's house to see a "tipping medium" named Stevens perform-an invitation they probably accepted on a lark. It is not hard to imagine a smug Pierce sitting with the rest of the audience, barely restraining a smirk as the medium placed his hands on the "small square table" and attempted to contact the dead. Pierce later wrote in his memoir that the table not only began to dance and "tip out answers" to spectators' questions, but that it "also tipped and danced out many tunes correctly" in a sort of odd musical entre-act designed to whet the audience's appetite before they were finally given the chance to come forward and join the medium at the table. 1

Judging from the tone of his narrative, Pierce wanted his readers to conclude that what came next was entirely the result of supernatural agency. "The medium," Pierce wrote, "then commenced asking of the spirits who of those present were mediums. When my turn came, he asked if I would be a medium." As Pierce later depicted things, "the  answer" was an unqualified "yes." He then heard Stevens ask the spirits to tip "out the number of days before I should become a medium. The question was answered by four tips of the table, signifying that I should be a medium in four days." According to this account, on day four, Pierce held a seance of his own, this time at his boyhood home. He wrote that he was sitting at the dinner table, waiting "to see if the spirits would tip as they had said they would," when the furniture began to jump, as if on cue.2

At this point in his narrative, Pierce ratcheted up the drama. Portraying himself as a pugnacious, dyed-in-the-wool skeptic, he claimed that he refused to "believe spirits had anything to do" with the dramatic events of the week. His "mind," he wrote, not spirits, had "performed the operations." Yet, he was careful to steer his readers away from the conclusion that the incident was the product of some mental disorder; it would not do for the public to interpret his experiences as hallucinatory episodes or the result of illness.

Instead, Pierce continued to advance the idea that he was sincerely trying to get to the bottom of what was happening to him. So once more he determined to test his apparent powers, this time at his father's house. It was there, he alleged, that he called "on all other powers to tip" the family table. Nothing. "Then," he wrote, "I ... ask[ed] if there was any spirit present to tip the table, and it immediately answered such questions as I saw fit to ask.“3

As Pierce later portrayed things, the "spirit" voices insisted in the strongest terms that he fulfill his "calling." Demanding that he give up his business in order to travel as an itinerant channeler, they coldly threatened to "possess" his body by force if he did not willingly accept his public mission. "I asked what they wanted. .. to do, " he wrote.

"The answer was, To make a public medium of you." Pierce claimed that he flatly refused this plan, forcing the "spirits" to adopt a more persuasive approach. "They then reasoned with me at times for several days about the matter," he alleged, "but I said no, I would never give up my business for anyone." According to Pierce's depiction of event, the "spirits" found this to be so patently unacceptable that they embraced the drastic tactic of forcibly controlling his body, going so far as to possess his arm in public and used it to spell out spectral messages. Later, he wrote, they made his mind "suffer" at night, and compelled him to return to them each morning, cowed and humiliated. "In this way," he recorded, "I was led on for several months, and during that time many mediums told me, as I met them in the circles, You have a public mission to fulfill but I did not believe it, as I was not a learned or public man, and thought it could not be." As he described it, the spirits also took away his appetite, and then afflicted him with a raging fever. On one dramatic occasion, he asserted, they even beat his head against a settee as a way of attracting the attention of spectators at a public spiritualist meeting. 4

Pierce plays up his vacillation between outright defiance and meek submission to great dramatic effect in his story, though as the narrative moves forward, the medium gradually reimagines himself as warming to the idea that was truly a conduit for the spirits. Readers of his story will notice that Pierce goes from describing the supposed spirits as unwanted intruders in his mental and physical life to seeing them as allies in a  grand-indeed, almost holy-project to make him into a powerful channeler. In the space of a few pages, his account transforms itself into a memoir of a pliant, even humble, religious figure, where it had once been a harsh account of an obstinate backslider. What is more, following this narrative turning point, incidents of dramatic persecution and ascetic self-denial, as well as occasional allusions to scripture, come to assume a central place in the story. In one obvious reference to the Bible, Pierce responds to an assumed spiritual command to begin his life as an itinerant medium, by first laying out two coats to pack in his travel bag. As he depicted the event, the directive from the "spirits" was an unmistakable rewording of Jesus' charge to his disciples recorded in the Gospel of Matthew; Pierce writes that the "spirits said I could not carry but one." Later in his telling of the story, when he asks the "spirits" what he ought to do when his supplies are spent, they again respond with biblical language: "more will be provided for you; go as we direct you, and you shall not want whereof to eat, nor a place to lay your head." And in yet another biblical allusion, Pierce alleges that his "spirit" handlers assure him of his important role in saving humanity from spiritual darkness. In an apparent reference to Jesus' parable of the wheat and tares, they encourage Pierce to "press onward in your Heavenly mission, so that the vineyard may be renovated and gleaned of the cumbersome weeds and tares of errors and fears that have so long captivated and enslaved the human family" (his emphasis).5

In many ways, Pierce's publication of The Revelator was utterly predictable. A coalescing of cultural and technological forces in nineteenth-century America, including a steadily rising literacy rate, changes in the printing industry, and an increasingly democratic politics, opened the way for Americans from nearly every walk of life and social circumstance to write and publish their personal narratives. (Beggars, slaves, and convicts, joined clergymen, businessmen, and politicians in using autobiography as a useful way of distinguishing themselves from others like them.) For entertainers, in particular, self-narrative became a compelling means of self-promotion in a highly competitive and unpredictable world. (The publication in 1835 of actress Fanny Kemble's Journal of America for instance, likely improved her social standing by driving home the point that she hobnobbed with such eminent men as Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams.) But for many nineteenth-century Americans, autobiography was something more: it was a genre of reinvention- a way for writers to "assert imaginative propriety over events" in life and imbue those events with an aura of authenticity. It was, to put it more succinctly, a chatice to remake one's persona and rewrite one's past.6

Like so many other public mediums, the image of himself that Pierce put before the public in his autobiography was of a sincere seeker after religious truth and a pious  servant of the spirits. It would be very easy to buy into this literary portrayal and accept the notion that mediums' narratives were transparent reflections of their intentions or experiences, but we must steadfastly resist the urge. Mediums' autobiographies might shed a little light on the events of their lives, but perhaps we should not strain too hard in trying to decipher the detail. The choice many public mediums made to represent themselves as pious laborers in a spiritual vineyard was primarily a strategic one, meant to garner public respectability and acceptance for their authors. In a society where cultural and social flux gave rise to new opportunities for defining one's identity, mediums like Pierce were able to skate on the thin edge that separated authentic experience from myth-making-or the boundary between telling their own (probably less interesting) stories and crafting tales that cast them in a more exceptional light. No doubt they were able to do this because of the instability and impermanency of identity as a category in nineteenth-century culture; as one historian of the period has put it, identit was not "something fixed and permanent, but something claimed and demonstrated."

When viewed from this perspective, mediums' autobiographical writing becomes an exercise in self-representation and image management, rather than the transparent retelling of a life story. 7

Maintaining a critical distance, then, inevitably leads us to a very different conclusion than the one Pierce and his compatriots would have wanted us to draw. To echo Grant Wacker's observation of early Pentecostal literature, while "otherworldly  aspirations" may have marked the "surface" of medium autobiography, "this worldly shrewdness" indelibly marked its "underside." In one published narrative after another, channelers invited their readers, either explicitly or implicitly, to accept a literary record of mediumship that under normal circumstances most thoughtful people would likely reject. The activities of most mediums, after all, tended to fall far beyond the pale of what a majority of nineteenth-century Americans would have considered either believable or respectable.8

Mediums' use of the rhetoric of religion and personal piety was meant to grease the wheels of public acceptance, meaning that for many of them, the tropes and signs of religion ultimately were meant to serve their careers. This connection was not accidental.

In the nineteenth-century, the Protestant rhetorical tradition still had the power to bestow credibility on its users, a fact not lost on channelers who nimbly and consciously exploited it. However, this exploitation took several forms in medium autobiography; mediums rarely stuck to a single rhetorical path. Indeed, as we will show here, there were actually three religious modes in which mediums wrote-the ascetic, the martyrological, and the evangelical-each of which became a powerful tool of imaginative literary depiction and promotion. Often they cropped up together in mediumistic narrative (as they did in Pierce's story), though each seemed to serve a different narratological or strategic function. The ascetic mode, for instance, focused the reader's attention on the medium's willingness to sacrifice worldly rewards for spiritual  ones, thereby countering critics' charges that channelers were unscrupulous frauds or money-grubbers intent only on fleecing their audience. Similarly, by accentuating the medium's physical and mental suffering, the martyrological approach sought both to elicit sympathy for individual mediums and to reinforce for readers the supposed spiritual value of mediumship. And the evangelical mode-which laid great stress on the idea of being called by supernatural means and undergoing a conversion-like experience-provided readers with a portrait of the medium as a selfless laborer in the cause of spiritual truth. In a visceral, emotional sense, most Americans steeped in the Protestant rhetorical tradition would have immediately understood and likely identified with such stories. But whether or not they accepted them or the mediums that wrote them is a question raised in the next part.

 

The Ascetic Mode

The ascetic mode was a particularly powerful tool for mediums to employ, particularly because the rhetorical power of ascetic self-denial lies in its ability to emphasize one's transcendence of the natural world, as well as to grant special status to those who achieve such a victory. A powerful thread in the development of the Christian cultural tradition, with roots that can be traced back at least to the biblical command to take up one's "cross" and follow Jesus, the idea of asceticism tends to evoke images of chanting monks holed up in medieval mountain monasteries. This, however, is only one  variant of asceticism; no doubt it had less of an impact on public mediumship than the Protestant variants of ascetic behavior that made their way to the New World in the seventeenth century or that grew up there later. Still, the cumulative "potential energy" of the long ascetic rhetorical tradition should not be dismissed. Strengthened by centuries-long use, its cultural power was a proven reality, ripe for exploitation by public mediums in the nineteenth century.

Puritanism-and in particular the Puritan concept of spiritual pilgrimage functioned as the seedbed of ascetic rhetoric and practice for many early American Christians. For the Puritans, the metaphor of pilgrimage connoted something far more than just a spiritual journey from sin to salvation; it was a trek through "the wilderness of humiliation and mortification" as one historian has described it, in order to rid oneself of worldly influences and bring one closer to God. The way individual Puritans chose to represent this process of self-abnegation in their writing seems to bear this conclusio out. Consider New England clergyman Thomas Shepard's charge to his fellow believers to "Let our drink be teares day and night ... Let us live alone as Pelicans in the wilderness." Similarly Nathan Cole, the Connecticut farmer and carpenter whose manuscript narrative of his "spiritual travels" sheds much light on how ordinary early Americans believed and behaved, claimed he sacrificed "all... Comfort of eating, drinking, Sleeping, or working" in response to the "weight of Sin" he felt in his "mind.“9

By the nineteenth century, asceticism had become passe for the more liberal Christian set. Nevertheless, the long tradition of ascetic living remained rooted in some parts of the American Christian experience; believers continued to nourish well the culture of self-abnegation planted in the New World by New England's Puritans. Some groups, like the Catholics, along with new populist religious groups like the Methodists, still held tightly to the principle of self-sacrifice and pointed to it as a marker of "true" Christianity.10 But. it was those with alternative religious views that maintained perhaps the strongest connection to the principle of ascetic living in the nineteenth century. These so-called religious "outsiders"-Mormons, Seventh-Day Adventists, Shakers, and a whole host of lesser-known perfectionist groups-reimagined, at a very fundamental level, the physical, sexual, and economic disciplines of American religious culture.

Influenced by eighteenth-century alternative religious movements like Pennsylvania's Ephrata Cloister (where ascetic rituals built around fasting, sleep deprivation, and celibacy became the core of devotional practice), these nineteenth-century movements sought to bring what their adherents believed was a new purity and discipline to American religious life. Mormonism, for instance, called on all believers to lay everything they possessed, including their lives, on God's altar, as a symbol of their religious commitment. Thus, we have early Mormon apostle William McLellin reveling in his journal over the fact that he and his traveling companion, Parley P. Pratt, "had  taken no money neither two coats" for a trip through Illinois and Missouri in 1833, "but only the glorious gospel [of] Jesus to recommend us." The principle of fasting also became a key devotional and self-disciplinary practice among Mormon adherents. More than one nineteenth-century Mormon missionary claimed fasting allowed him to be led to potential converts. Mormons, as well as Seventh-day Adventists, also proscribed the use of tobacco, alcohol, and other substances they believed were harmful, thereby institutionalizing ascetic practice. 11 Similarly, adherents of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing-otherwise known as Shakers-plunged full throttle into ascetic practices, almost from the movement's inception in England, rejecting human sexuality, family relationships, and individual wealth altogether. One of Shakerism's seminal texts, the Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing (1808), went to great lengths to play up the extreme ascetic outlook of Shaker founder Ann Lee, linking her dedication to the principle of self-denial to similar ideas held by history's other "heretics.“12

 This rich, ascetic rhetorical tradition-drawn from Puritan, evangelical Protestant, Catholic, and "outsider" sources-proved to be a valuable foundation on which public mediums could build. As they set to work crafting careful literary representations of themselves, spiritualist mediums no doubt found the cultural power of asceticism to be particularly useful and eminently exploitable. Returning briefly to Abraham Pierce's narrative, we begin to see hints of his strategic use of the language of self-sacrifice. One passage from The Revelator is particularly instructive on this subject. He had just received a "communication in perfect military style" from the spirit of George Washington--or so he maintained-which enjoined him to "carry our messages of truth to the enemy's camp" (presumably the rest of the skeptical world). Despite having only a little more than a dollar in his pocket and not knowing "how or whither I was going," Pierce claimed he engaged immediately in the work the supposed spectral Washington had commanded him to do. The spirits then led him to the homes of two spiritualist believers who took care of his physical needs.13

The implications of Pierce's portrayal of himself are fairly clear here. Not only are worldly concerns-in this case, financial security-unimportant in the grand scheme of things, they actually need to be sacrificed in order to tune oneself in to the message of the "spirits". Pierce would have us accept the notion that poverty, particularly for spiritual reasons, is a positive, rather than a negative, condition. It was a "spirit-over matter" argument Pierce was making about himself: he had "chosen" spiritual existence over mammon, and by doing so he transformed himself into a more effective instrument of the "spirits." (In other parts of the narrative he claimed he had become "as passive as a child," implying that his will was no longer his own, but had been ceded to supernatural beings). It should come as no surprise that the biblical language of coats and supernatural provisioning appears in the narrative just after this scene, providing an unmistakable link between the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice and Pierce's choice to surrender on the issue of financial independence.14

Later in his narrative, Pierce returned to the question of asceticism, again linking his denial of self with a commitment to a higher purpose, and claiming his willingness to forgo earthly pleasures in favor of what he characterized as his spiritual duties. "During all this time," he wrote, "I have gone by spirit direction, without money and without price, yet I have not wanted for anything, though I have been nearly out of funds, at times." Instead of relying on money, Pierce continued, "I rely upon the promise made to me at the outset of my mediumship, and look for its fulfillment so long as I shall be faithful in the discharge of the gifts bestowed upon me as a public missionary medium, engaged, as I believe I am, in the cause of God, for the redemption of mankind from darkness and error, which have so long enslaved the human family." The promise was, of course, that the "spirits" would take care of his every physical need. It was this agreement, Pierce intimated, that ultimately led him to give up his hard-won stall space in Philadelphia's market and live a life free of the fetters of fmancial responsibility and worldly dissipation. He was now on the "spirits' " errand; they would provide for him. 15

Pierce's emphasis on financial sacrifice likely helped him to downplay the commercialized aspects of his own mediumistic practice. By claiming that he operated "without money and without price," he was able to portray his labor as fundamentally  non-commercial. This would have been an important argument for Pierce, as well as other mediums, to make in light of the questions spiritualists like Sarah E. Crafts of Greenfield, Massachusetts, were beginning to ask about mediums' motivations. In a letter to the Banner of Light, dated March 1858, Crafts confessed that while Greenfield's "small band" of spiritualists welcomed the distraction of regular visits from traveling mediums, the collective financial situation of the town's spiritualists meant that they could lure only the most affordable trance speakers to her small Connecticut River town. Crafts made it clear that coming up with the typically hefty fees well-known mediums charged for their services was an unwelcome hardship for the Greenfield group. "We have not the means," she groaned, "to pay the large prices demanded by the best speakers." Her neighborhood, she continued, "was an excellent field for talented mediums, could they, at first, labor for love, not money." Hamstrung by their inability to pay for "star" mediums, Crafts and her friends were forced to hire only public channelers of the lowest profile.16

Comments like the ones Crafts made raise the question of just how much money public mediums made. It is impossible to give a round number that represents the experience of all public mediums. Still, if we assume that most mediums charged a dollar per seance (or what Henry Gordon charged per ticket at his Philadelphia performances), and multiply it by 30-a modest number for a trance seance audience receipts for a single performance could equal upwards of $30, while a full week of performances at one seance per day would bring in $210. Dividing that sum evenly between the medium and his manager, each could expect to pocket more than $100 per week-a kingly sum when one considers that a leading stock performer on a New York stage in 1860 might only make between $50 and $100; even the best supporting players only made between $15 and $40 for a week's work.17

Another medium whose appropriation of the rhetoric of asceticism was even more direct than Pierce's was John Brown. Brown, the self-styled "Medium of the Rockies," was born in Massachusetts in 1817, but early on moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he spent the greater part of his childhood. By the time he reached adulthood, he had been making a living for several years by trapping and hunting in the American West.

According to Brown's autobiographical rendering of his life, he was a "prophet" of sorts, supposedly divining the location of lost items and people and foretelling the future with the help of the "spirits." (His rumored expertise in this regard won him something close to celebrity status in the rough-hewn male subculture of the Rocky Mountains.) Like his mountain man chums, he was a drinker and heavy user of tobacco. He immediately jettisoned those vices, though, when a particularly virulent disease laid him low. In Brown's autobiography, indulgence morphs quickly into self-denial, the consequence of which, he claimed, was greater physical health and a more robust connection to the spirit world. "I was a slave to tobacco," declared Brown. Now he was a nee man who intended to devote his life "to the good work." His mediumistic mission renewed, Brown wrote to his readers that he wished he "could take you with me [to the spirit world], so you could see and hear as I do. Perhaps you do; I hope so.“18

In emphasizing his decision to do away with the physical vices that were undermining his health, Brown was tapping into a long religious tradition that posited an intimate relationship between physical discipline and spiritual power. As was mentioned earlier, Mormons and Seventh-day Adventists both proscribed the use of substances they counted as harmful, because those substances supposedly did violence to one's spirituality. (Ellen G. White, Seventh-day Adventism's prophetess, claimed that Adventist health policies were as "closely connected" with religious truth "as the arm is connected with the body. ") The link between the physical and the spiritual in the nineteenth century, however, went beyond the simple avoidance of tobacco or alcohol.

Indeed, the Christian physiology movement-led by such creative antebellum reformers as Sylvester Graham (who gave his name to the Graham cracker )-fused the spiritual and moral with the natural through the exercise of ritualized physical discipline. Practitioners of water-cure (a form of therapy that relied on washing and imbibing pure water to bring about healing), in particular, contlated the spiritual and natural; Russell Trail, one of the movement's leaders, went so far as to characterize sin against physiological law as sin against God. 19

Other mediums seemed to follow Brown's example of enlisting the rhetoric of physical denial to define their mediumistic experience". Augustus Merrick, of Concord, Massachusetts, was one of these; though he never published an autobiography, his private record of some key aspects of his career are instructive as they reinforce the strategic significance of ascetic self-denial in the way medium's rhetorically framed their lives and careers. Born in 1810, Merrick seemed to enjoy all the advantages available to members of the New England middle class; his father, local storekeeper Tilly Merrick, provided his family with a degree of financial stability, while his mother, Sally Minot Merrick, supplied her children with an enviable pedigree that included ties to the influential Minot clan of Concord. Yet, despite these advantages Merrick seemed destined for a life of economic failure. A chronic squanderer of financial resources, he was eventually forced into the less-than-lucrative occupation of pocketbook-maker in order to make ends meet.

In the face of such a disappointing turn of events, Merrick probably turned to his parents for solace, but this avenue was eventually closed to him with their deaths (Sally Merrick passed away in 1816, and her husband followed in 1836).20

The death of his parents gave Merrick the opportunity to remake them into spirit beings in his writing, playing the role of spirit ventriloquist and putting into their supposedly spectral mouths the words he desperately wanted to hear. The parents' words, as Merrick recorded them, were soothing, but direct, calling him to a life of austere physical discipline. Merrick claimed that his spectral father chided him for being a  tobacco addict-a character flaw the "spirit" claimed would send the young man into a "state of absolute depression" and make him unfit for mediumship. Arguing that his son's dependence on the stuff had "completely saturated" his brain and had driven him into a "partial state oflethargy," the alleged spirit parent pressed Merrick to shake himself free of his habit and embrace a loftier mission. "Now I would have you know that you was [sic] formed for a higher perpose [sic]," a spectral Tilly Merrick supposedly declared through a medium. "There is a work for you to perform for the benifit [sic] of mankind."

This important labor, however, could only be realized if Augustus found his way clear of his addiction. Once he was free, the supposed older Merrick assured his son, "spirits will then be able to manifest themselves through you. Thus will you become a bright and shineing [sic] light to all that may be drawn within your sphere." In a second more pointed message the "spirit-father" reinforced this notion, adding that the young man's habit was "a greate hinderence [sic] to our developing you as a medium. We want to accomplish much through you, and, will if you will attend to what is required for your development.“21

No doubt mediums like Merrick, Brown, and Pierce were taking at least some of their cues from people within the spiritualist movement; public mediums' narratives were in some measure inspired by the expectations of spiritualist observers. It is important to note, however, that critical observations from spiritualists were as much hopeful  aspirations for how they wanted mediumship to function, as they were accurate reflections of medium ship in the real world. Still, internal forces within the movement were instrumental in motivating mediums to exploit the language of asceticism in describing their work. Mediums who were paying attention would have noticed that editors and writers in the spiritualist press constantly tried to link "good" channeling directly to a life of self-denial. Consider, for example, an 1857 column in the Banner of Light that argued mediums "should live in a pure, elevated spiritual state." "If fasting and prayer be required of them in order to fit them for the working of some miracle," the author exclaimed, "they should fast and pray." Moreover, he wrote, "they should take up their cross and follow in the footsteps of their divine predecessor, Christ. Then the water would again be turned into wine, the sick healed, the dead would be raised, and God's name be glorified through the mediums of the present age." Twenty years later, these views remained relatively unchanged; similar calls to asceticism were still floating about in spiritualist papers. According to the American Spiritual Magazine, impurity in the form of "wicked desires, material affections and faithless aspirations" clouded the veil and impeded God's ability to "draw nigh" to mortals "through his ministering angels.“22

According to these spiritualist critics, one had to submit wholeheartedly to the spirits in order to be truly effective as a medium. The most effective mediums, suggested one spiritualist commentator, were those that denied themselves and humbly yielded "their own individual natures for a time" to supernatural forces, granting the spirits free use of their minds and bodies to act as conduits between the mortal and postmortal worlds. A true medium's aspiration, the writer declared, "must be to receive and to give unto others truth in its most perfect form," even at the expense of their own comfort and autonomy. The burden of mediums hip, he continued, could prove to be too taxing if channelers did not remember to keep themselves "plastic, easily molded, quiet, spiritual and even." Other observers were equally blunt. Channelers who succumbed to vanity, wrote a correspondent to the Banner, ran the risk of having the "wheat of their medium powers... choked by the rank weeds of folly, envy, self-righteousness, and a thousand other nameless evils which are growing in the great Babylonian garden all around them."

When they defied their supposed spiritual guides, mediums cast doubt on the supernatural character of the very communications they received. As spiritualist Charles Hammond put it, "when mediums resist, nothing reliable can be written.“23

This being said, why were mediums drawn to the language of self-denial? Of all the rhetorical strategies available to them, why did they show such a propensity for using the language of asceticism? For the answer to these questions, we must reconsider the rhetorical use of ascetic discipline by the nation's so-called "outsider" religious groups.

On its face, drawing any amount of attention to one's rejection of behavioral norms even if such a repudiation of "normalcy" is couched in the language of religion-would seem to be an obvious recipe for disaster. Nineteenth-century Shakers, for instance, quickly discovered firsthand how denying capitalist culture, human sexuality, and the  ideal of the nuclear family could stoke the fires of hatred in the hearts of would-be persecutors. In the context of religious culture, however, rhetorical references to self denial are something of a two-edged sword: they may cut one way and create a pretext for persecution and violence, but they can cut the other way as well, functioning as a powerful source of group identity and public visibility. As R. Laurence Moore has pointed out, one of the profound ironies about American religious life is the fact that when those on the religious "fringe" resort to deviance as a rhetorical device for positioning themselves over and against the rest of the world, they win a modicum of moral authority over their "competitors." Certainly the principle of self-denial has often been tarred with the brush of "extremism," but that does not preclude the principle from operating on other less negative registers as well. In the hands of skilled dissenters, negatives often become positives; instead of allowing self-denial to be characterized as simple fanaticism, ascetics transform it into a sign of chosenness and spiritual purity.

Mormon believers, for example, have turned a case of physical self-denial into a proselytizing tool, by representing abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, and

similar substance as one of the key signs of election that separates them from non believers. So too Shakerism's commitment to celibacy, while serving as a lightning rod at times for persecution and public mockery, became perhaps the most fundamental symbol of their moral superiority (at least to some Shakers and their sympathizers).24

Apparently, this lesson of self-representation was not lost on the nation's public mediums. In their literary work, they struggled to direct the attention of their readers away from ,the idea that they were grasping showmen, motivated by money or warped by corrupt physical vices; they wanted to be seen as spiritual virtuosos, dedicated to bringing spiritual truth to the world as part of an established tradition of ascetic self-sacrifice. But, they could not escape the reality that, in some sense, they were still showmen. The rhetorical power of asceticism was limited in what it could accomplish. As we will later demonstrate, spectators did not always accept mediums' representations of themselves, and often interrogated the latter's claims to supernatural guidance and spiritual discipline. Consequently, some mediums were motivated to up the ante, by portraying themselves as veritable martyrs to the spiritualist cause.  
 

The Martyrological Mode

As with asceticism, claiming the badge of martyrdom for oneself in' the religious world of nineteenth-century America was an effective strategy for attracting public attention. Gradually, over many centuries, the character of the martyr had achieved something close to iconic status-particularly in the world of religion. Christianity, especially, has exhibited an odd obsession with martyrdom.25 Indeed, some scholars would agree that it is not much of a stretch to say that modern Western Christianity was, at least in some sense, "forged in a crucible of conflicting convictions and dramatic deaths." That is not to say, however, that the cultural meanings assigned to martyrdom remained static over time. As early as the fourth and fifth centuries, Christian thinkers (including the influential Augustine of Hippo) were already beginning to "spiritualize" martyrdom, stripping the word of its past linguistic moorings in the act of physical suffering. Predictably, this growing spiritualization of the martyr lessened the rhetorica power of physical martyrdom, but it did not extinguish it. Well into the modem age, bodily suffering at the hands of religious persecutors, sometimes even to the point of death, remained a highly potent way to signify one's devotion to an idea or principle.

Recognizing the rhetorical possibilities of martyrdom, public mediums borrowed heavily from the martyrological tradition, casting themselves as pious sufferers for spiritual truth.

By highlighting their patient willingness to bear the heavy burdens of physical violence and verbal ridicule placed upon them by angry "unbelievers," their goal was to engender public sympathy for themselves and prove their supposed spiritual value.26

The martyrological rhetorical mode enjoyed a respected place in nineteenth century American Christian literature. Martyrdom (or at least the rhetoric of martyrdom) was in the cultural air, due in no small part to the fact that the "martyr" was an attractive character for many of the nation's Christians. Martyrdom was firmly rooted in biblical tradition, but was also seen as very necessary to the growth and development of the contemporary Christian movement. American Christians would have recalled their parents and religious teachers teaching them as children about the afllictions of Old Testament prophets like Daniel and Elijah, and of how Jesus and his followers suffered under Roman and Jewish authorities. For those who remembered these stories, biblical martyrs became representational models of how they too could "suffer patiently." The Bible, however, likely did not stand as the lone shaping influence on the American martyrological tradition. Historical examples also added weight to Bible stories. Indeed, the early Christians' conception of death by martyrdom laid a solid foundation for using suffering as a spiritual-literary trope that modem Christian autobiographers fastidiously built upon. Shakers, Mormons, and other American sectarians constructed their religious identities on a foundation of written records of persecution. (The Mormons went so far as to encourage adherents to document their sufferings at the hands of non-Mormon mobs, and "publish [them] to all the world," including "the heads of government.")27

Even those clear winners of the nineteenth-century religious marketplace-the Methodists-relied on their self-image as a persecuted people to bolster the claim that they were chosen by God. It should not surprise us, then, that renowned Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright peppered his autobiography with tales of harassment at the hands of unbelievers. (On one occasion, a wealthy Tennessee man vowed to kill the young preacher for baptizing his wife and two daughters; the infuriated father and husband believed that the women had fallen in love with Cartwright.28

Other evangelical Protestants like proto-Holiness preacher Julia Foote also recorded what they saw as the deep hatred and discrimination their religious ideas engendered. (For Foote, it was her advocacy of the doctrine of sanctification that set the hearts of some black Methodist churchmen against her.) The daughter of former slaves, Foote joined herself to the African Methodist movement at the age of fifteen and,set to work immediately proclaiming the beauties of sanctification. Particularly opposed to her kind of preaching was Jehiel C. Beman, a pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, who, according to Foote, became enraged at her refusal to obey his command to stop spreading "her holiness stuff' through his Boston congregation. Indeed, Beman became so obsessed with Foote's preaching that he eventually dragged her before a church disciplinary council and had her excommunicated. According to Foote's autobiography, when she suggested that she would continue her preaching (only now in Boston's private homes instead of its pulpits), Beman spread lies about her around town.

Yet, for Foote, the pastor's antics only reinforced the historical lessons of religious persecution. Like those believers who "suffered persecution and death for the name of Jesus Christ," beginning with the saints of early Christianity, she too could be "happy and glorious in martyrdom.“29

For men and women like Foote and Cartwright, the language of martyrdom functioned as a common idiom-pregnant with shared meaning and built on a common cultural and historical foundation-that Americans familiar with Christian ideas and the martyrological tradition would have found both intelligible and useful. In her study of female preachers' autobiographies, Elizabeth Elkins Grammer demonstrates the relish with which female Protestant autobiographers repeatedly deployed the theme of martyrdom in an effort to communicate to readers their intrinsic value as Christians.

Jarena Lee, who joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1804, recognized the apparent link between Christian piety and persecution, writing that "the ministers of Jesus must expect persecution, if they would be faithful witnesses against sin and sinners." (Or as Lydia Sexton, a preacher for the United Brethren Church, put it more succinctly, using William Penn's words: "no cross no crown.") Likewise, Nancy Towle, who preached in the 1820s as a non-denominational itinerant across the United States, Canada, England, and Ireland, "rejoiced" when she was arrested for preaching in public, and delighted in "becoming a 'prisoner' for Christ Jesus' sake." For her, suffering was a telltale sign of her blessed condition before God. More importantly, though, her willingness to endure persecution also demonstrated what she believed was her importance in the spiritual drama of religious witnessing.30 No doubt she and her fellow preachers regularly recalled the biblical passage from Paul's epistle to the Hebrews, with some satisfaction: "For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every man he receiveth.“31

Of course, martyrdom also has its worldly rewards. Acting the martyr was, to paraphrase Grammer, paradoxically powerful. It was an admittedly ironic calculus: by "advertising" oneself as a martyr, mediums could ultimately convert their collective "marginal and oppressed status" into public esteem and visibility.32 Physical suffering, in particular, had great potential to capture the attention and imagination of readers of medium autobiography, and there is no more illuminating case to consider on this subject than Henry Steel Olcott's (later co-founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875) literary representation of William and Horatio Eddy's rocky career as public mediums. Olcott, an erstwhile military investigator, attorney, and newspaperman, had been introduced to the table-tipping variety of spiritualism by distant relatives in the 1850s, and had chosen in the 1870s to investigate the strange rumors of ghostly visitations that were coming from the remote village of Chittenden, Vermont. 33

While not an autobiography in the literal sense, Olcott's People from the Other World (1875) is still "autobiographical," at least by nineteenth-century standards; its "as-told to" quality may be thought of as a sort of collaborative narrative shaped by both the journalist and the mediums. (Many writers from the era contracted themselves out on a fee-for-service basis to pen personal narratives.)34

The book begins by focusing on Eddy family folklore, which held that William and Horatio, who both lived on a small central Vermont homestead, near the town of Chittenden, were blessed with "second sight," or clairvoyance. (It was a supposed genetic bequest from their Scottish forebears on their mother's side.) Family members claimed the young Eddys "played by the hour with children, visible only to their eyes" or were sometimes "gently floated through the air by some mysterious power." People also claimed to hear "strarige voices" and "mysterious sounds" around their cradles. These assertions were clearly meant to legitimize the Eddys' careers as public mediums; tales of early manifestations created a framework of supernatural "authenticity" for William and Horatio's later claims that they were guided by spirits. According to their allies, by the time they reached early adulthood, the brothers had developed into full-blown mediums allegedly able to materialize spirit forms before awestruck audiences. The price of their fame, however, seemed to have been physical persecution-at least if we accept Olcott's representation of their career.35

Shot through with numerous references to the physical victimization of the Eddys at the hands of their opponents, Olcott's book at times devolves into a shocking litany of sadistic episodes in which the mediums are subjected to inhuman, disfiguring torture, sometimes with their own parents looking on. To be sure, mental persecution also, dogged the Eddy brothers (if Olcott's book is to be believed); robbed of an opportunity to gain even a rudimentary education, they were never able to "enjoy the companionship of boys and girls of their own age." It was the physical violence the Eddys allegedly endured, however, that received top billing in the book. "Scored with the lash, cicatrized by burning wax, by pinching manacles, by the knife, the bullet and by boiling water," the mediums' bodies bore the physical signs of abuse.36 Once, William had "scalding hot water", poured down his back and a "blazing ember" put on his head, in order to startle him out of a supposed trance. (He still had the scars to prove it, and later showed them to Olcott.) On other occasions, wrote Olcott, the brothers were "passed through the merciless hands of scores of ' committees of skeptics,' bound with cords by 'sailors of seven years' experience,' and riggers 'accustomed to tie knots where human life was at risk,' " until their "soft young metacarpal bones were squeezed out of shape, and their arms covered with '" scars" from the melted wax used to make sure their bonds were secure. The "wrists and arms" of the brothers, declared Olcott, were "a sight to see."

Both of them had "a marked groove between the ends of the ulna and radius and the articulation of the bones of the hand," and were "scarred by hot sealing wax." All of this ugliness had been inflicted on the Eddy siblings, Olcott fulminated, by "fools who seem to have been unable to discover suspected fraud without resort to brutal violence on the persons of children.“37

Not satisfied with a simple literary portrayal of the Eddys' physical victimization, Olcott supplemented his words with visual representations of their abuse. In the book's second chapter, he provides readers with a series of images in which William and Horatio Eddy are bound in nearly every grotesque position imaginable. In one picture, one of the two brothers (the author never clearly identifies which is which) is tied spread-eagled to a wooden bed. In several others, the brothers are hogtied, bent over into what can only be described as ghoulish positions, while in another, one, of the brothers has a tightened noose about his neck, and is gagged with a short, stout rod, secured by a rope behind the head. And in perhaps the most provocative image of all, one of the two siblings is tied to a cross, with the ropes-clearly evident in the picture cutting deeply into his flesh. The significance of this last image seems particularly obvious, equating the brothers' suffering with Jesus of Nazareth's death on a Roman cross.38

John Brown, a medium who operated in the Rocky Mountain West, also claimed to have been an occasional victim of physical cruelty, once even being imprisoned by a group of fellow backwoodsmen intent on preventing one of his alleged spirit-guided "prophecies" from coming true. According to his autobiography, Brown awoke one morning to see "all the men in camp sitting quietly around me." (Even from our perspective more than a hundred years later, this behavior seems menacing.) The men refused to leave camp. without first finding out from Brown which of them was destined  for injury that day. Assuring them they had nothing to worry about, Brown declared that the only unfortunate incident of the day would be that his mule would break its leg. The rest of the trappers nevertheless bound him and left him under guard in camp, thinking that they had insulated themselves from his supposed occult powers, but in the end, Brown's "prophecy" came tru~at least in his version of the story.39

Henry Gordon told a similar tale in his Autobiography of Henry C. Gordon: And Some of the Wonderful Manifestations Through a Medium Persecuted From Childhood to Old Age, published sometime in the 1880s with the assistance of Thomas Robinson Hazard. (The exact year of publication is unknown, though the fact that events from 1884 dominate the account seems to indicate that the narrative was published in, or shortly after, that pivotal year.) By all appearances, the story seems to be more Gordon's than Hazard's-a point the medium wanted so desperately to drive home that he included a deposition on the final page of the account to prove it. According to a statement sworn before Philadelphia notary public W. W. Dougherty on April 28, 1884, Gordon appeared before him personally to claim the story as his own and affirm that it was both "true and correct.“40

At the core of Gordon's story was his alleged abuse by a cabal of unscrupulous and vicious people. The first was his father, who, according to Gordon, "became very cruel and used to tie me to a bedstead and lash me with a trunk strap until my back was raw and bloody. He would then wash my back with salt brine." When the. older man eventually tired of beating the young medium, he kicked the boy out of his house "and told me I should never darken his door again while I had these devilish influences around me." As Gordon related his story, later, after he had become established as a popular medium, his wife, who turned out be a very shrewd woman, was able to get control of his money and other assets, and then have him committed to an insane asylum where he languished for some time before a sympathetic doctor was able to get him released. On the lam, she took up with another man, and was able to stay one step ahead of both Gordon and the law. The medium finally gave up trying to find her. In addition to all of this, Gordon even claimed that members of one of his audiences once tried to poison him. "I kept my bed for several days," he wrote, "before I could be removed, and vomited and voided blood for eight days“ 41

We can justifiably doubt some of the claims about victimization and violence that made their way into mediums' autobiographies. Did the Eddy brothers really suffer all the abuse Olcott's book detailed? Were they really bound and gagged in all the ways the images in the book showed? Did Brown's compatriots really imprison him out of fear that his allegedly spirit-inspired predictions would come true? Did spectators really try to poison Henry Gordon? Maybe not. The autobiographical genre has its obvious flaws: the limitations of memory and the human tendency to inflate one's experiences and accomplishments militate against the absolute accuracy of autobiographical writing. On the other hand, there is no compelling reason to call into question the veracity of every claim Brown, Gordon, or the Eddys (through Olcott) made. But perhaps it does not really matter either way, because what is actually at issue for us is not the accuracy of mediums' self-narratives, but rather what mediums were trying to accomplish by representing themselves as hapless victims of bodily violence and suffering. Why, in their autobiographical endeavors, were they almost pathologically focused on the issue of physical victimization, to the near exclusion of other types of abuse? What rhetorical purpose, if any, did such an emphasis on physical pain and violence serve?

One compelling answer is that mediums were seeking public sympathy for their alleged suffering by tapping into the mid-nineteenth-century cult of humanitarian sensibility. Pain-or more accurately, the way it is interpreted and understood-is historical. For medieval Christians, pain had no single meaning: it was seen as both punitive and redemptive, punishing sinners on the one hand for their ungodly behavior, while also allowing suffering believers to transcend their mortal situation though imitating Christ's suffering. By the eighteenth century, however, there was much less cultural room for pain, with enlightened humans now seeking to eradicate it forever. At the forefront of this cultural revulsion from pain was what we might term the Anglo American "humanitarian sensibility," whose intellectual roots are so diverse that it is hopeless to deal with them at length here; much of what we now label "humanitarian" ideology emanated from a fluctuating mixture of Lockean more philosophy, Scottish common-sense thought, evangelical Protestantism, capitalist culture, and English Latitudinarianism (which posited that "human nature is instinctively sympathetic").

Nevertheless, we can pinpoint some of the intellectual and cultural threads that bound the humanitarian sensibility together. Through the musings of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and others, for instance, the Lockean notion that one's moral sense was enough ultimately to restrain evildoing became a particularly powerful force in shaping Anglo-American attitudes. But, Lockean ideas did not entirely dominate the field. According to Latitudinarian clerics, sympathetic humanitarianism was also driven by more immediate emotional payoffs, namely the "pleasurable feelings" that "virtuous actions" generate, while from the Scottish Enlightenment we get the notion that human benevolence was at least partly motivated by the need to restrain the forces of self-interest in an emerging commercial society. 42

With these foundational facts fresh in our mind, how, we might ask, did sympathetic discourse manifest itself in nineteenth-century America? The formalized cult of mourning was certainly one way that an emerging American middle class attempted to display its capacity for sympathy. According to the cultural prescriptions of bourgeois American culture, one could show no greater feeling that to grieve at the passing of another human being or to attempt to console those still living. As one historian of the nineteenth century has argued, "mourning ... was held sacred by sentimentalists as the purest, the most transparent, and thus the most genteel of all sentiments. II Sympathy became a mark of true sensibility- and thus a badge of bourgeois social status. But one did not have to show sympathy only toward humans to qualify as genteel; the humane treatment of animals became yet another marker of middle-class status. For many nineteenth-century Americans~ particularly those who took up the banner of vegetarian reform cruelly inflicting pain on helpless animals was a horrid abomination.43

Perhaps the most salient features of sympathetic discourse in nineteenth-century America however- can be found in the moral struggle to end chattel slavery. It is here in America's negative reactions to the institution of human bondage-that the power of a coherent sympathetic sensibility is easiest to perceive. 44 Beginning in the 1830s-antislavery tracts increasingly focused on the vicious physical abuse black slaves endured in the American South- turning the „ gruesome tribulations of the body into a key staple" of abolitionist literary efforts. The stories of suffering slaves that filled these tracts were carefully selected to appeal to the sensibilities of a population whose tender feelings had- over time- been cultivated by constant exposure to philosophical and religious calls to virtuous behavior and sympathy for one's fellow human beings. At its core- the new genre interrogated and critiqued the violence Southern slave owners and drivers visited on the bodies and psyches of the enslaved, but more importantly it attempted to create new emotional connections between the reader and the individual suffering slave.45

Antislavery authors like Lydia Maria Child and Theodore Dwight Weld drew readers into their writing by describing, in detailed, pungent language, the pain of the yoke and the lash, with the idea that such language would provoke the most visceral response from readers. In most cases, that is precisely what happened: the sensationalistic nature of "suffering slave" narratives was highly effective in producing just such a reaction. To put it simply, depictions of pain elicited sympathy-though, of course, it really was more complicated than that. Evoking sympathy was an intricate process in which an observer's attention to another individual's pain sparked an instinctive empathic relationship with the other person. Secular, philosophical forces inherited rtom the eighteenth century remained key ingredients in this sympathetic response, though by the nineteenth century, evangelical Christianity, with its emphasis on creating a "religion of the heart," added a new valence to American humanitarianism, and continued to draw attention to the so-called "slave problem." By the 1840s and 1850s, abolitionism's plea to sympathize with the physically abused slave drew much of its power from Protestant revivalism.46

By choosing to describe their suffering in print, public medium autobiographers hoped to elicit a response similar to what sensational antislavery literature engendered.

By composing their written accounts of persecution to parallel the gruesome details of physical pain in antislavery literature, they hoped to tease their readers into reacting as philosopher Adam Smith outlined in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and conceive of themselves "enduring all the same torments ... enter[ing] as it were into" the medium's "body" and becoming "in some measure the same person with him." Mediums seemed intuitively to understand that to sympathize with someone was to engage in an imaronative exercise. Thus, they structured their self-narratives so that readers could mentally identify with their physical pain.47 The written and visual portraits of the bound, burned, and tortured Eddys were unmistakably designed to wring pity from the American reading public. Yet, there was a certain irony built into the publication of such literary and artistic representations: as mediums coaxed their readers into accepting sensationalized, lurid renderings of their lives, they encouraged readers to engage in a sort of literary voyeurism. Thus, even as mediums sought to draw out the public's disgust with scenes of their gothic suffering, they helped give rise to a sort of "pornography of pain" (to borrow Karen Halttunen's phrase) in which titillation became as much a product of the mediums' narratives as a distaste for pain was. (For mediums, of course, the good news about titillation was that it generated as much attention as revulsion.)48

Public sympathy, though, was really only part of what mediums were seeking when they played up their physical suffering in published autobiographies. A corollary to the sympathetic calculus in mediums' martyrological writing was the idea that martyrdom could prove one's elect status by emphasizing one's willingness to bear suffering cheerfully. If literary martyrdom had the power to elicit sympathy from readers, it also was useful in bringing public attention to the work of mediums, as well as bestowing religious credibility on them. Mediums apparently took a page from the book of sectarian religious groups who approached persecution much as they did asceticism-as a marker of supernatural election, rather than as a sign of failure. As was mentioned earlier , many religious Americans believed that their ability to abide persecution without losing faith was a sure indication of God's favor. Henry Olcott, for one, made this case for the Eddys (though it was the spirits' favor, rather than God's, they supposedly sought). He argued that in suffering cruelly the brothers found themselves in notable historical company, a link in the chain that ran directly back to the martyrs of premodern Christianity. "We must turn back to Fox's 'Book of Martyrs' if we would catch the diabolical spirit that has been exhibited" toward the Eddys, he wrote. True, the nineteenth century was not the sixteenth, but the "feeling of intolerance in the Church toward these latter-day heretics [Horatio and William Eddy], is substantially the same as that which sent [English Puritans Nicholas] Ridley and [Hugh] Latimer, [John] P. Radford and [Thomas] Cranmer to the stake." By enduring the "handcuffings and ligatures, the blisterings and acid corrosions, the torture of constrained positions, of mouth-gags and halter-nooses," the Eddys effectively became a part of the martyrological pantheon and transformed Olcott's book into a modem Book of Martyrs. Public mediums like the Eddys, Olcott argued, "are necessary to the general welfare, and must be content to suffer and even die for the race. It requires a rare elevation of character to cheerfully endure martyrdom.“49

The language of martyrdom seemed to serve public mediums very well, by working hard to extract a sympathetic response from readers, and by placing mediums squarely within a long and venerable tradition of suffering for one's religious ideals. That latter message would likely have played especially well in a highly religious culture like the one that existed in nineteenth-century America. As mediums must have discovered, however, pitching oneself simply as a martyr severely limited the story one could tell.

Tapping into a wider-ranging religious vocabulary opened up a vast array of other possibilities for rhetorical exploitation.  
 

The Evangelical Mode

In reality, the rhetorics of asceticism and martyrdom were often interwoven with a language similar to what American evangelicals used to describe their experiences. (Some mediums even wrote in all three modes.) The irony of this is that at least for serious spiritualist thinkers, such as Andrew Jackson Davis, the self-proclaimed "Poughkeepsie Seer," spiritualist theology (if we can even think of such a thing as a coherent entity) had more in common with the doctrines of liberal Protestantism than with evangelicalism. (Spiritualism, historians contend, provided Unitarian come-outers with verification that the idea of eternal damnation was wrongheaded, and more or less affirmed the Quaker doctrine of inner light.) Indeed, traditional wisdom suggests that spiritualists allied with liberal Protestants in denying the importance of a sudden conversion experience-which for evangelicals was a near undeniable article of faith-in favor of "the softer notion of gradual growth and nurture through spirit influence." All of this, however, is the exception that proves the rule. The choice of public mediums to adopt an "evangelical" mode of writing had nothing to do with doctrine. Rather, it was a strategic decision, designed to borrow on the growing cultural power of evangelical Christianity in the American republic.50

The political and cultural strength of Protestantism in the decades that separated the Revolution and the Civil War illuminates the question of why public mediums went  to such great lengths to infuse their self-narratives with Protestant allusions and imagery.

While the passage of the First Amendment to the national Constitution dealt the traditional system of state-supported churches a hard blow, the church establishment system still persisted in a few northern states until the nineteenth century. (Connecticut did not abolish its system of multiple religious establishments until 1818, while Massachusetts ended a similar system in 1833.) Even in states where religious establishments had been outlawed, Protestant churches were still powerful institutions.

Blasphemy laws remained on the books in most states throughout the nineteenth century. In fewer cases, states required public officials to swear a belief in Christianity (as Pennsylvania did) or limited officeholding to Protestants (as Georgia did). In the words of historian Jon Butler, the men and women of antebellum America "shaped a society extraordinary in its religious energy, vigor, and will-a society indestructibly and inevitably American, bearing a rising Christian presence." By the 1860s, American Protestantism had become a "mass enterprise" with insurgent evangelical groups like the Methodists and Baptists accounting for much of the growth among Protestants. In such an environment, it would make perfect sense for mediums to describe their activities using a religious vernacular that ordinary Americans (who were at least sensitized to the growing power of evangelical Protestantism, or who were evangelicals themselves) would recognize. Public mediums were men and women of their time and would have been acutely aware of the escalating power of evangelical Protestantism and the utility of tapping into the evangelical rhetorical tradition.51

Much like their evangelical contemporaries, medium autobiographers tended to identify their alleged preternatural call as the pivotal event of their lives. And while they did not directly invoke the vocabulary of conversion as many evangelical Protestants did (that is, they did not describe their relationship to the supernatural using the biblical tropes of "new birth," conviction, repentance, or justification), they did acknowledge the importance of accepting what they believed was their holy call and of submitting to the will of the "spirits," even if it meant enduring physical illness or occasional persecution.

In many ways, these mediums paralleled elements of what Virginia Brereton has identified as the "formula" of the nineteenth-century evangelical conversion narrative.(As Brereton defines it, the classic version of this narrative pattern usually opened with a discussion of the convert's early life, after which the author described, in order, the "conviction" over his own sinfulness, his eventual surrender to God's will, the changed behavior and attitudes that resulted from his conversion, and finally his struggle with periods of depression and recalcitrance as well as his periodically renewed dedication to the Christian cause.)52

Following the evangelical pattern, mediums' regularly claimed their struggles with physical and emotional disorder began in childhood and did not abate until something that approximated conversion was achieved. By locating the roots of their mediumship in the formative years of childhood or adolescence, mediums like former actress Emma Hardinge Britten could present themselves in print as child prodigies, the potent heirs of paranormal gifts passed down genetically trom proto-medium ancestors.

Claiming she was actually "born a witch," Britten was a native Londoner who haunted churchyards and "old monastic ruins" as a child. In these places, she wrote, "strange sounds would ring in my ears, sometimes in the form of exquisite music ... sometimes in voices uttering dim prophecies of future events, especially in coming misfortunes." Then there were the apparitions she claimed she encountered as she wandered: "forms of rare beauty or appalling ugliness ... wearing the human form, and conveying impressions of identity with those who had once lived on earth." According to the budding medium, such encounters were frequent, and became so commonplace that the spirits supposedly began to intervene directly in her life. When suicidal thoughts overtook her following her father's premature death, Britten reported that it was his spirit that led her back from the brink of self-destruction. In her mind, such "exceptional early experiences" were "so many stepping stones" on the path to becoming a highly effective instrument in the hands of the spirits. Britten even interpreted physical illness in her youth as a mechanism for honing her supernatural abilities. The "happiest period of my immature years," she intimated, was when she was "laid on a bed of sickness." As she put it, "to pass away in dreams ... into lovely green fields amidst strange and most beautiful [spirit] people, was such rapture to me, that I was wilful [sic] enough to try and take cold, so that I might be laid up and go off to my unknown and fascinating fairyland." Ironically, only the family servants grasped the full meaning of her supposed abilities, Britten alleged, always whispering "in low tones amongst themselves, that, the child had described some of their dead relatives, also that whatsoever I prophesied was sure to come to pass" (her emphasis).53

Youthful familiarity with the supernatural was actually a fairly standard trope in many written accounts of medium experience. John Brown, for instance, argued that his connection to the "spirits" came at the tender age of seven when he first began to hear disembodied voices. "At times," he wrote, "it seemed as though they were talking to me, for I would distinctly hear them say: 'John, we have come to help you, we love you, we  love to be with you, we want you to live with us.'" Later, Brown claimed, the voices materialized into embodied spirits, a mghtening turn of events for a boy so young; only the intervention of his supposed spirit guardian saved him trom certain emotional breakdown. "This same spirit has been my near and dear mend ever since, " declared Brown. "He has saved me trom drowning in the dark waters; he has saved me from being devoured by wild beasts; he has saved me trom the tomahawk and scalping knife of the wild Indian. ,,54 Other mediums also supposedly manifested similar preternatural skills early on in life. So-called spirits- for instance- identified Sarah Appleton as a medium when she was only twelve years of age. According to the young woman's biographer M. E. B. Sawyer~ it was through her father- a devout-but apparently very open-minded-Methodist, that the "spirits" tapped her as a supernatural adept. While away: from home on business, the father had accepted an invitation to attend a seance- and came away convinced that "in his own family was a peculiar medium." (He later decided- through a similar seance at home, that the medium was Sarah.) Persuaded that his daughter was meant to bring together the mortal and immortal realms in a unique way, the older Appleton sat with the young girl regularly as she "developed" her powers.

On most occasions- the "spirits" supposedly wrote to her father through her controlled hand which according to Sawyer was nothing short of miraculous considering the fact that ill health since infancy "had deprived her of all school advantages" and had essentially made her illiterate. 55

If references to early life assumed a key narratological function in mediums' life stories by naturalizing their supposed supernatural gifts or by suggesting that those giftswere somehow "genetic," similar allusions to childhood and adolescence also were standard in evangelical conversion narratives and autobiographies, though such references sometimes played a different rhetorical role in those accounts. In the Protestant case, the experiences of youth might be used to exhibit an early, innocent virtuosity in spiritual things; however, evangelical authors also sometimes portrayed their early lives as foils against which they could compare their later years of "self preaching and general service to the Christian cause. Thus, the standard Protestant conversion narrative might begin by connecting the events of the convert's childhood to early advances in spirituality, though some authors intimated that the religiosity of their youth was a sham: church attendance, as well as regular prayer and Bible study, was sometimes portrayed as a cover for transgression and youthful rebellion.

African-American preachers Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw, both of whom recorded their religious experiences in some detail, followed this latter pattern closely. Lee even went so far as to open her autobiography-published in 1836 under the title The Lift and Religious Experiences of Jarena Lee-with a particularly evocative example of her lax morals as a child. As she described it, her parents (who apparently were too poor to take care of her) hired her out as a servant to a Mr. Sharp who lived some distance from her home. Shortly after moving away, Lee was asked to perfonn some work, which she shrugged off and lied about completing. The emotional and spiritual results of this action appear to have been quite dramatic. "At this awful point, in my early history. " Lee later wrote in her autobiography, "the spirit of God moved in power through my conscience, and told me that I was a wretched sinner. On this account so great was the impression, and so strong were the feelings of guilt, that I promised in my heart that I would not tell another lie." This resolution, however, did not prevent her from sinning again; as she put it, "notwithstanding this promise my heart grew harder." Only conversion more than a decade later released Lee ftom the vicious cycle of sin, guilt, and temporary penitence. 56

An even more faithful emulation of the standard evangelical pattern on youth was Zilpha Elaw's Memoirs of the Lift, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw (1846). By writing that she had been born to pious parents, Elaw suggested that she was no stranger to religion. Yet, perhaps due to her parents' early deaths and the accompanying feeling that she was ftee from "religious restraint," the female preacher became infected by "the evil propensities of an unregenerate heart ... and heedlessly ran into the ways of sin, taking pleasure in the paths of folly." While her "father's death ftequently introduced very serious reflections into [her] mind" and drove her into "seasons of serious contrition," her associations with the rebellious "juvenile members" of her Quaker foster family, marked, as she put it, "by the accustomed gaities [sic] of a wanton heart," prevented her from thinking seriously about repentance. "I had been trained to attend the Quaker meetings; and, on their preaching occasions, I was pleased to be in attendance" she wrote, "but I was, notwithstanding, usually very much cast down on account of my sins before God.“57

The close attention that mediums and evangelical autobiographers paid to their experiences as youngsters makes more sense when we consider the perceived relationship between youth and piety that found currency in the nineteenth century. For many concerned adults, adolescence was a time of great moral danger; young men and women were leaving family farms and rural towns in ever greater numbers for cities where they were falling into lives of prostitution, robbery, gang violence, alcoholism, and general debauchery.58 Only personal religious conversion, pious observers claimed, could stem that tide. Thus, ministers began to turn their attention to young men and women, reaping souls among that population in such numbers that according to denominational authorities, "young people" (usually defined as those between 12 and 23) accounted for the greatest number of antebellum America's converts; indeed, more than one evangelical Protestant noted that the experience of conversion, at least in the revivals that rocked the early 1800s, was very much the province of men and women in their teens and twenties, and rightly so. As scholar Joseph Kett has shown, even critics of the revivals recognized the association between religious conversion and adolescence when they implied that the misguided audacity of young converts (who appeared to believe, erroneously, they had the right to exhort or correct their elders once they accepted Jesus) proved that the revivals were flawed. For many nineteenth-century Americans, however, it was infinitely better to be lectured to by converted youngsters than to see them wallowing in sin. No doubt evangelical autobiographers recognized this and offered their accounts of youthful extravagance and sin as cautionary tales for future generations. Mediums seem also to have picked up on the cultural connection between youth and piety, though they wrote on a different register that tended to equate childhood with budding supernatural talent, rather than childish sinfulness. Still, both camps agreed that the years that separated infancy and young adulthood were key years in the development of one's spiritual life and therefore paid close attention to them. 59

It is important to note here that when some mediums characterized their early lives in print, they often portrayed poor health as a state that meshed easily with the proto-mediumistic experiences of childhood. Physical illness, sometimes going back to infancy, was a common theme for many mediums and often presaged receiving and internalizing the spirits' alleged call. If they did not exactly welcome in print the emotional and psychological trials that usually accompanied severe sickness, many mediums at least played up the perceived affinities that existed between physical infirmity and spiritual skill. (It has already been shown how Emma Hardinge connected the two issues in her mind, associating her exceptional ability to communicate with perceived spirits as a child with moments of ill health.)60

The issue of sickness, however, usually was eclipsed in significance by the spirits' alleged call to mediumship in most medium self-narratives. It is important to note that not every medium acknowledged experiencing a dramatic call to the work of spirit human mediation-at least not as dramatic as Abraham Pierce's encounter with the supposed spectral world highlighted at the beginnjng of this chapter. Literary evidence shows, however, that many mediums portrayed the experience of discovering their mediumship as both emotionally charged and physically restorative. Emma Hardinge Britten represented her alleged initial encounter with spirits, for instance, as particularly powerful; the "revelation" that she had been selected to be a medium left her feeling, in her words, "baftled and aghast." According to Britten's autobiography, she emerged from that first seance "into the streets an utterly changed being ... and passed out into the air with the consciousness-nay, the certainty that it was full of Spirits ... all alive and thronging around us." Other mediums, like Vermont's Achsa Sprague, agreed that the episode of calling or selection was fundamentally transformative, physically as well as emotionally. Writing to a skeptic who had asked to know more about her mediumship, Sprague characterized her supposed spectral call as a moment in which she passed beyond "the shades of death" into the "sunlight of hope and the rainbow of promise."

Speaking of her dramatic physical turn from sickness to renewed vigor, Sprague explained that while she was still "far from a good state of health," when she "look[ ed] backward" and beheld herself "in the hours of... darkness and desolation" immediately  prior to her calling, she realized just how radical the bodily change was that she had undergone. Now, she declared, "[I] perceive myself ... daily improving.“61

Such emotional descriptions of supernatural calling closely parallel the language evangelical Christian autobiographers used in order to characterize conversion. For both mediums and evangelicals, profound spiritual transformation and intense feelings of newness formed the core of how they described their "conversion" experiences. Jarena Lee, for example, recounted her conversion in terms very similar to Emma Hardinge Britten's and Achsa Sprague's. Upon forgiving those who had trespassed against her, and letting go of the malice that she harbored in her heart "against one particular individual," she recalled feeling something like a figurative "garment, which had entirely enveloped my whole person, even to my fingers [sic] ends, split at the crown of my head, and was stripped away from me, passing like a shadow, from my sight-when the glory of God seemed to cover me in its stead." Similarly, Massachusetts Pequot and Methodist convert William Apess stated that at the moment of his conversion "there was not only a change in my heart but in everything around me. The scene was entirely altered. The works of God praised him, and I saw him in everything he had made. My love now embraced the human family." Echoing Britten's impression that spirits literally surrounded her after being called as a medium, some evangelicals even claimed they saw or felt the presence of supernatural beings at the moment of their conversions. Julia Foote claimed that "a ray of light flashed across my eyes, accompanied by a sound of far distant singing; the light grew brighter and brighter, and the singing more distinct, and soon I caught the words: 'This is the new song-redeemed, redeemed!' I at once sprang from my bed where I had been lying for twenty hours, without meat or drink, and commenced singing" the same song the angelical voices had been Singing.62

Most mediums described initially feeling fear or panic at the idea that the "spirits" had tapped them for development as channelers, but these first emotions often were accompanied by a maelstrom of other competing feelings, including surprise, indignation, joy, and resignation (to name a few). John Brown recalled the paradox of feeling both frightened and peaceful the first time he claimed he became aware of his supposed mediumistic powers. The story goes that he had been out weeding the family garden when he met a crowd of materialized spirits. Unused to such strange encounters and substantially frightened by the thought of being surrounded by a spectral mob, Brown lit out for home and the safety of a locked door. But locks, Brown claimed, were no match for a skillful and determined spirit like his "guardian angel" Mopoloquist; according to Brown, the kindly spirit threw open the barred door and strode confidently into the boy's refuge, where he solemnly declared that he had "come to remove all fear from me." A simple symbolic exchange and a few well-chosen words was all it took for Mopoloquist to calm the boy. "All fear and' fright left me," Brown wrote, "and I had a strong desire to be close to him.“63

As Abraham Pierce's story demonstrates, the emotional response often triggered by the calling of the "spirits" could also develop into full-blown rebellion or backsliding. Or at least this was what mediums wanted readers to believe; rebellion served to fit well a "conversion to backsliding to recommitment" pattern common in evangelical self narrative. According to Pierce, his initial response to the idea that he should travel as a public medium was brazen defiance, a stance that only softened when the alleged spirits openly threatened to possess his defenseless body. Yet, as the text of Pierce's account suggests, this was something of a pattern for the lukewarm medium who vacillated regularly between the opposing roles of committed believer and backslider. Other mediums more skillfully inhabited the role of backslider; in written representations of themselves, they simply let their enthusiasm for talking with the dead grow cold instead of erupting into open mutiny against the spirits. According to Emma Hardinge Britten, her conviction that her performances were spirit-guided occasionally faded when she neglected her mediumistic talent. Mrs. Kellogg, the supposed spiritual adept who assumed the burden of "developing" Britten as a medium, advised her charge to "continue to sit at stated periods for practice," now that she had allegedly been called to labor as  public channeler. But as Britten represented things, the daily rhythms of life soon got in the way. The young medium-to-be swore she would not ignore her mentor's counsel, but recalled that "the convictions of the Spiritual origins" of her "performances waxed weaker and weaker with the lapse of every hour." Only a jarring first-hand experience in February 1856 with the supposed ghostly victim of a shipwreck brought her back to the belief that she had been tapped to speak for the SpiritS.64

Backsliding and resistance to spiritual callings were also common tropes in evangelical autobiographies and conversion narratives. As Catherine Brekus shows in her book on female preaching, itinerant evangelical preachers often resisted what they perceived as their call to witness for Jesus Christ. Mill worker and preacher Salome Lincoln, who compared herself to the biblical Jonah, recalled fleeing "from the presence of the Lord, to get rid of duty.“65 So too, Rhode Islander Elleanor Knight allowed her fears to discourage her from preaching, a decision she believed brought upon her God's judgment in the form of her husband's martial infidelity and the deaths of two of her children. Other evangelicals, such as William Apess, remembered turning back to their sinful past after converting to Christianity. Not long after feeling the heart-melting emotions of conversion, recalled Apess, "I began to lose sight of religion and of God."

He soon fell in among old chums and bought a bottle of rum, "of which poisonous stuff I drank heartily." Later, he enlisted in the army, where his former penchant for rowdiness was also rekindled. He did not tell his fellow soldiers that he "had ever made a profession of religion. In a little time I became almost as bad as any of them, could drink rum, play cards, and act as wicked as any.“66

Neither medium autobiographies nor evangelical autobiographers, however, dwelled too much on their backsliding ways. Indeed, taking cues from evangelical authors, mediums were scrupulous about directing their readers' attention to the work they did as proof of their dedication to the spirits' cause; in a society that idealized work, it stands to reason that public mediums would choose to represent their productivity as evidence of their distinctiveness, as well as their commitment to spiritualism. Consider once again the case of Abraham Pierce. Pierce clearly wanted readers to assume that he

believed wholeheartedly in hard work and perseverance, even in the face of physical suffering and penury. To make this case, he structured the last half of his autobiographical account to look like a travelogue, in which dry details of places visited . and people met dominated almost all discussion of spiritual themes. He dedicated practically every paragraph to a new locale: first it was New York, then Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, New Orleans, 81. Louis, Ohio, and a host of towns and cities in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine. And in each new town, he intimated, he played to "full houses" and aroused "much interest [in the spirit world]," though it drained him physically, emotionally, and fInancially.67 But, such challenges, Pierce concluded, came with the job of being a medium. Lingering on this point, as if to give it time to seep into his readers' consciousnesses, the medium declared that though he had "gone by spirit direction, without money and without price" and had "been nearly out of funds, at times, II he realized that it was the responsibility of the "public missionary  medium" to bear such burdens, and embrace them as part of the "cause of God, for the redemption of mankind from darkness and error, which have so long enslaved the human family.67 He had an obligation to forget his personal challenges and forge ahead in order to prepare the world for what he believed was the imminent "second coming of Christ, or the spiritual era, in which His Spirit will descend by the power of His Father into every heart, and all will be born anew and become as little children." Pierce's implicit claim seemed to be that his response to the spirits' call, plus his extreme suffering and physical distress (caused by constant travel), should equal a place in the pantheon of exceptional public mediums. 68

But would readers have seen it this way? Would they have interpreted Pierce's record of his productivity and diligence as he wanted them to-as verification of his supposedly elevated value as a public medium? Again, we have no definitive evidence that they did, but based on what we know about nineteenth-century American culture, it is easy to speculate that readers who cut their teeth as children in the 1830s and 1840s on the wildly popular moralistic tales of Jacob Abbott and Maria Edgeworth discerned his message. According to historian Daniel Rodgers, the Abbott and Edgeworth stories were widely available in their heyday, and seemed to stick in the memories of readers for decades; writer Edward Everett Hale touted his ability to recall one of Edgeworth's tales from memory at the age of sixty-five. Maybe this was because storybooks like Abbott's

Rollo at Work (1838) were not all that sophisticated. But their lessons clearly were memorable. By connecting the values of perseverance and self.denial with notions of exceptionality and public esteem they were meant to impress upon young minds the importance of assimilating the period's producerist ethic. They would have learned, through six-year-old Rollo and his father, that while "labor" was never meant to be fun, it did build character. When Rollo complains that his job of sorting nails all day is "dull," the father retorts: "You see it is very necessary ... that you should have the power of confining yourself steadily and patiently to a single employment, even if it does not amuse you. A real man, the boy's father intimates, "expect[S] that [work] will be laborious and tiresome, and ... go[ es] steadily forward notwithstanding." The implications of the text are clear: distinction, at least for industrious male workers, comes through self-denial and self-discipline, or as the hero in one of Edgeworth's stories put it, "it is by industry and study alone, that men become great and esteemed.“69

Even if readers did not perceive Pierce's record on his terms, it is difficult to imagine that his story of privation and relentless service was not, in some sense, a promotional ploy. Other religious writers of the period certainly utilized the record of their hard work as an instrument of self-promotion. If we accept Elizabeth Grammer's analysis of the autobiographies of American female evangelists, marginalized nineteenth century authors used written reports of their productivity to assert their spiritual distinctiveness and defend their right to preach. According to GnUnmer, women preachers in particular represented themselves as God's faithful, resolute servants  precisely by linking their own productivity to the cosmic fate of humanity. In her words, "the urge to wear out the reader with statistics" was born of a "powerful imperative" on the part of male and female evangelists "to quantify their work" for readers. When viewed from this angle, Nancy Towle's written account of her ministry becomes more than a pedestrian record of distances traveled and hours spent in Christ's service; it proves her remarkable usefulness in God's hands. Towle made a point of recording in her autobiography the exact number of miles she traveled, and, like her sister preachers Lee and Zilpha Elaw, also reported in great detail her movements from place to place. To these proofs of productivity she also added the intense emotional and physical challenges she had to face on a daily basis. As Grammer has shown, there was good reason intensity of feeling and action on the part of Protestant evangelist-autobiographers like Towle and Lee. As "Bible Christians," they believed they were instruments in God's hands for bringing about the Second Coming of Christ. God expected them to be anxiously engaged in His good cause. Such a significant calling meant that they had little time to rest or relax, if they wished to convert those the Lord was preparing before the end. 70

At least part of the reason women preachers were so careful to quantify their exploits had to do with the fact that they were literally "strangers and pilgrims" in the nation's churches. Like Pierce and other spiritualist mediums, female evangelists like Lee and Towle occupied a rather ambiguous space in American religious culture; they were never "insiders," but they were never wholly outside the culture either. One Protestant congregation might welcome them, while the people in the next hamlet down the road might run them out of town. Of course, male itinerant preachers faced similar threats, but they at least had the potential to rise in authority within the churches. Thus, Grammer points out, these male itinerants had no great need to "overemphasize conversions wrought and miles traveled in the service of the Lord" in their own autobiographical work, because they had worldly success and institutional power to "reassure" themselves and "their readers of [their] worthiness. " Women like Towle and Lee, on the other hand, would never be rewarded with rank or title for a job well done in the field; they had only their published exploits to justify them before the public. Any hope of public vindication or notice for marginalized women preachers rested on the careful record of useful labor they kept. The same principle seems to have been at work among mediums. The cultural marketplace was a capricious thing, making a positive record of productivity one more useful rhetorical "arrow" in the public medium's".

In the end, what the nation's public mediums hoped to achieve with the publication of their personal stories-as embroidered and uncritical as they were-was sympathy, public recognition, and, ultimately, increased worldly success. Abraham Pierce, especially, seemed to believe that if the public responded positively to his autobiography, he could build enough of a reputation to achieve some success, both in the real world and in the realm of public opinion. Evidence suggests, however; that his quest was not entirely successful. In 1868-nearly eleven years after the publication of Revelator-Pierce came out with a second book titled Extracts from Unpublished Volumes. The book, published in 1868 by William White and Company of Boston, reads like a nineteenth-century science fiction narrative in which Pierce allows his body to be controlled by an alien being named Nepulah. In this possessed state, Nepulah-Pierce describes the solar system in great detail, claiming that both the sun and moon are able to support life, and that polygamous marriage is the true order of the universe. These and other details make the Nepulah communications an intriguing set of documents, but they represent Pierce's parting shot to the public. According to the Year-Book of Spiritualism for 1871, he finally settled down in New England, probably to practice as a local or private medium. By 1872, he disappears altogether from the historical record. 72

It is tempting to think that Pierce's relative lack of worldly success proves that the choice many medium autobiographers made to couch their life stories in the language of martyrdom and pious religiosity was a bad one. We can be fairly sure, however, that despite a lack of readers' reactions to medium autobiography in the historical record, at least some American readers would have been smart enough to connect the dots between the language of the Protestant rhetorical tradition and the content of mediums' self  narratives, and perhaps sympathize with the image of the persecuted or pious medium.

Ultimately, what readers were imbibing, though, was fundamentally a literary construction. Pierce and his compatriot autobiographers were showmen forced to compete against other popular performers, including actors, circus performers, traveling lecturers, and burlesque dancers (to name only a few)-but they did not want to be thrown in with such company. Rather than allowing themselves to be seen as the cultural performers they were, they turned to the language of religion to mask that reality.

Painting themselves as something more than run-of-the-mill showpeople, public mediums endeavored to set themselves apart from the rest through religious imagery. Their stories, however, still operated on a promotional register, despite their religious content. This fact hints at the reality of marketing as a central concern in the mundane world of public mediumship.

 

Spiritualism P.1

Spiritualism P.2

Spiritualism P.4

Spiritualism P.5

Spiritualism P.6

Bibliography and Works Cited

1 Abraham P. Pierce, The Revelator: Being an Account of the Twenty-One Days' Entrancement of Abraham P. Pierce. Spirit-Medium. at Belfast, Maine,
Together with a Sketch of His Life, 1 st ed. (Bangor, Maine: Published for the author by D. Bugbee & Co., 1857),3. Tipping mediums were those that claimed to move furniture or other heavy objects supernaturally through the agency of the spirits.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid., 4-6.

5. Ibid., 8 and 14. The biblical passages referenced by the spirits can be found in Matthew 6,10 and 13, as well as Mark 6, and Luke 10.and 12.

6 Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Na"atives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 7; and Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American Theater: Actresses and Audiences, 1790-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994),44. On the relationship between autobiography and biography, see Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). For more on autobiography, see Herbert Leibowitz, Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography (New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1989); Diane Bjorklund, Interpreting the Self: Two Hundred Years of American Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Stephen Carl Arch, After Franklin: The Emergence of Autobiography in Post-Revolutionary America (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2001).

7 Fabian, Unvarnished Truth, 42. Mediums tended to market their autobiographies in the spiritualist press. Advertisements for medium self-narratives can be found in editions of the Banner of Light, the American Spiritualist, the Spiritual Scientist, and other spiritualist newspapers and magazines.

8 Grant Wacker, Heaven Be/ow: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), ix.

9 Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982),63; Thomas Shepard, The Sound Beleever, or, A Treatise of Evangelic all Conversion ... (London, Printed for R. Dawlman, 1645),318-319, quoted in Hambrick-Stowe, Piety, 61; and Michael J. Crawford, "The Spiritual Travels of Nathan Cole," William and Mary Quarterly 33 (January 1976),94.

10 See Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999),82; and John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 57, 64.

11 Jan Shipps and John W. Welch, ed., The Journals ofWi//iam E. McLe//in, 1831-1836 (Provo, Utah: BYU Studies; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994),89; and Ronald L. Numbers, Prophetess of Health: Ellen G. White and the Origins of Seventh-day Adventist Health Reform (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), chaps. 2 and 7. See also Parley P. Pratt, Jr., ed., The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1985),204.

12 Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 59,71-78. On the place of ascetic discipline in Shakerism, see Clarke Garrett, Origins of the Shakers: From the Old World to the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

13 Pierce, Revelator, 11-12.

14 Ibid.. 10.

15 Ibid., 20.

16 Banner of Light (Boston), 5 March 1858. The Banner of Light will hereafter be referred to as BI.

18 John Brown,. The Mediumistic Experiences of John Brown, The Medium of the Rockies (Des Moines: Moses Hull and Company, 1887), 130.

19 Ellen G. White to Brother Aldrich, 20 August 1867, Ellen G. White Estate, Inc, Washington, D.C., quoted in Numbers, Prophetess, 160; Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 141.

20 On the Minot and Merrick clans see Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976).

21 Tilly Menick to Augustus Menick, undated manuscript letters, Augustus Menick Papers, Concord Free Public Library, Concord. Thanks to Leslie Perrin Wilson for introducing me to her own work on Augustus Menick. See Leslie Perrin Wilson, "Taps in the Wall and Thumps in the TableDrawer," Concord Journal 72 (January 4, 2001), 6.

22 BL, 18 April 1857; and "The Inner Life of Man," American Spiritual Magazine, January 1877,1.

23 BL, 10 April 1869 and 18 April 1857; and Charles Hammond, Light From the Spirit World: Comprising a Series of Articles on the Condition of Spirits, and the Development of Mind in the Rudimental and Second Spheres, 2d ed. (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1852), 4.

24 R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 33; Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University oflUinois Press, 1987), 128; and Stein, Shaker Experience, 231-232.

25 See Lacey Baldwin Smith, Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World (New York: Alfted A. Knopf, 1997).

26 Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modem Europe (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1,50. On martyrdom in Jewish and Christian antiquity, see Daniel Boyarin, Dyingfor God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

27 Smith, Fools, 90; Moore, Religious Outsiders, 35 and 46. On the Mormon commandment to keep a record of anti-Mormon depredations, see Doctrine and Covenants ] 23

28 Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770-1810 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 13. The incident of the wealthy Tennessean can be found in W. P. Strickland, ed., The Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, The Backwoods Preacher (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1856), 144-146. For other accounts of persecution that Cartwright included in his autobiography, see pages 60-61, 90-92, 131-132, 236-237, 312-316, and 376-384.

29 For Julia Foote's recounting of Jehiel Beman's activities, see Julia A. J. Foote, A Brand Plucked from the Fire: An Autobiographical Sketch (Cleveland: Printed for the Author by W. F. Schneider, 1879), reprinted in Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, ed. William L. Andrews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986),205-' and 209. For a more complete treatment of female preaching in antebellum America, see Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

30 Elizabeth Elkin Grammer, Some Wild Visions: Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 107-108; Jarena Lee, Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel, Revised and Correctedfrom the Original Manuscript Written by Herself(philadelphia: Printed and Published for the Author, 1849), 32; Lydia Sexton, Autobiography of Lydia Sexton (Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing House, 1882),368; and Nancy Towle, Vicissitudes Illustrated, in the Experience of Nancy Towle, in Europe and America (Charleston: Printed for the Authoress, by James L. Burges, 1832),63.

31 Hebrews 12:6.

32 Grammer, Wild Visions, 110.

33 Howard Murphet, Yankee Beacon of Buddhist Light: Life of Col. Henry S. Olcott (Wheaton, Illinois: Theosophical Publishing House, 1988), 24-39; and Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1996), 39, 40. See also Henry Steel Olcott, Old Diary Leaves: The History of the Theosophical Society, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1895), 1-2.

34 Fabian, Unvarnished, 42-48. Fabian has shown that illiterate subjects often benefited from "ghostwriting" relationships. One such collaboration, that of poet John Greenleaf Whittier and former slave James Williams, resulted in controversy when opponents challenged the truthfulness of Williams's story. Scribes for illiterate convicts also faced similar questions concerning the authenticity of their accounts, in part because audiences often doubted the writers' accuracy and motives.

35 Henry S. Olcott, People from the Other Wor/d(Rutland, Vermont: C. E. Tuttle, 1875),23-25.

36 Ibid., 33.

37 Ibid., 26-28.

38 Ibid., 37 and 41.

39 Brown, Mediumistic Experiences, 46.

40 Henry C. Gordon and Thomas R. Hazard, Autobiography of Henry C. Gordon: And Some of the Wonderful Manifestations Through a Medium Persecuted From Childhood to Old Age (Ottumwa, Iowa: Publishing House of the Spiritual Offering, 188-?), 4.

42 Karen Halttunen, "Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture," American Historical Review 100 (April 1995): 304-305. See also Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers: 1815-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978),24,78; Keith Thomas. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (Oxford: Oxford University press, 1983), esp. 173-181; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),65-77; and Thomas L. Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part I," in The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 107-135 passim..

43 Karen Halttunen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 124; and Karen Iacobbo and Michael Iacobbo, Vegetarian America: A History (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2004), 55-64. See also Franklin Sanborn and William T. Harris, Memoir of Bronson Alcott, vol. 1 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), 34 1342, quoted in Iacobbo and Iacobbo, Vegetarian America, 59

44 On the place of pain and sympathetic discourse in American antislavery agitation, see Elizabeth B. Clark, '''The Sacred Rights of the Weak': Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture ofIndividual Rights," Journal of American History 82 (September 1995): 463-493.

45. Ibid., 465, 467.

46 Ibid., 476-477. See Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal In Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1833),6; and Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), esp.7-10. See also Fabian, Unvarnished.

47 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: Printed for A. Millar, 1759),9.

48 Halttunen, "Humanitarianism," 304.

49 Olcott, Other World, 34, 36, 69.

50 Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989),33 and 43-49. Only recently have religious historians taken a hard look at the relationship between Universalism and spiritualism, though they often disagree about the extent of that relationship. Ann Lee Bressler, for instance, suggests that spirituaIism appealed only to the most disaffected Universalists. See Ann Lee Bressler, The Universalist Movement in America, /770-1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 98 and 111-125. John Buescher, on the other hand, claims that Universalists "were quite disproportionately drawn" to spiritualism, and "no denomination lost more of its leaders to it." He also argues that while spiritualism did not have quite the -same impact on Unitarianism as it did on Universalism, many Unitarians "were similarly drawn to the belief and practice of contacting the spirits." See John B. Buescher, The Other Side of Salvation: Spiritualism and the Nineteenth-Century Religious Experience (Boston, Skinner House Books, 2004), viii-ix. Of course, by the mid-nbteteenth century, Universalists were relative newcomers to the liberal side of American Protestantism. In the years immediately following the Revolution, Universalism was still very much a militant sect akin to the Shakers or Freewill Baptists. See Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999). On Davis, see Robert W. Delp, "Andrew Jackson Davis: Prophet of American Spiritualism." Journal of American History 54 (1967): 43-56; idem, "Andrew Jackson Davis's 'Revelations,' Harbinger of American Spiritualism." New-York Historical Society Quarterly 55 (1971): 210-234; and idem, "A Spiritualist in Connecticut Andrew Jackson Davis, The Hartford Years, 1850-1854." New England Quarterly 53 (1980): 345-362.

51 Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990), 261 and 288; and Nathan 0 Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989),4.

52 Virginia Lieson Brereton, From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women's Conversions, 1800 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 3-13. Brereton's conclusions are based on her reading of hundreds of spiritual narratives fi'om the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See also Rodger M. Payne, The Self and the Sacred: Conversion and Autobiography in Early American Protestantism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998). On conversion among Puritans, see Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life. 2d ed. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1989).

53 Emma Hardinge Britten and Margaret Wilkinson, Autobiography of Emma Hardinge Britten (Manchester and London: J. Heywood, 1900),2-6. An abbreviated biographical treatment of Emma Hardinge Britten can be found in the Banner of Light. See BL, 31 July 1858. Thoughts of suicide and physical illness were both common tropes in evangelical autobiographies.

54 Brown, Mediumistic Experiences, 19-20. According to famed spiritualist editor Moses Hull in his preface to the Brown's autobiography, the trapper-cum-channeler supposedly beat out Kate and Maggie Fox as the first true medium of the modem age. This feature, along with the sensational aspects of his story (he once faced death at the hands ofhis fellow trappers for being "a wizard"), seemed to inflate him into a figure of heroic proportions. It likely was this larger-than-life quality, along with readers' "widely expressed desire" to have his experiences "in a more convenient and durable form than scattered through the columns of a newspaper" that initially caused Hull to think of publishing Brown's story. How those scattered pieces of Brown's account were gathered into that "convenient and durable form," however, was the pressing question for Hull. Careful to identify Brown as the source of the account, he made it clear that the "work [was] not a biography" written by a second party. Rather, it was the medium's own story, though it was "not by any means, the whole" of it. What, for Hull, made it Brown's account rather than anyone else's was the fact that it underwent very little editing. "As a large part" of Brown's account had "already appeared in the form of newspaper articles" in Ottumwa, Iowa's Spiritual Offering, the editor had only to collect the articles and fashion them into a book that was both "readable and comprehensible." While it is clear to us today that Hull's participation unquestionably affected the narrative's construction, he stood by the idea that he honored the desire of both "author and editor" and kept his impact on the text to a minimu55 [M. E. B. Sawyer], History of the Mediumistic Development of Miss Sarah E. Appleton, The Wonderful Writing Medium (Manchester, N. H.: C. F. Livingston, 1875),6-7. Sawyer, it appears, was also something of a poet, occasionally publishing her work in the Banner of Light. See BL, 22 March 1873.

56 Jarena Lee, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee. A Coloured Lady. Giving An Account of her Call to Preach the Gospel (Philadelphia: Printed and Published for the author, 1836), reprinted in Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit, 27.

57 Zilpha Elaw, Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience. Ministerial Trave/s and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw (London: Published by the authoress, 1846), reprinted in Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit, 54-56.

58 Joseph F. Kett, Rites o/Passage: Adolescence in America. /790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 93-102. On the historical development of adolescence in America, also see Steven Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), esp. 76-89. The classic study of the relationship between urban life and morality in Victorian America is Halttunen, Confidence Men. In it, Halttunen makes the case that many rural Americans and authors of advice manuals conceived of the city as a virtual nest of confidence men who preyed on the unsuspecting youth who were moving to urban areas in greater numbers in order to seek their fortunes.

59 Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Selfin Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977),60-1; and Kett, Rites, 64-65.

60 Britten and Wilkinson, Autobiography, 24.

61 Achsa W. Sprague to Mr. Stone, 1 May 1854, Achsa W. Sprague Papers, Vennont Historical Society, Barre.

62 Lee, Life, 29; William Apess, A Son of the Forest: The Experience ofWi//iam Apess, a Native of the Forest, reprinted in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Bany O'Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992),21; Foote, Brand, 180.

63 Brown, Mediumistic Experiences, 19-20.

64 Britten and Wilkinson, Autobiography, 31.

65 Almond H. Davis, The Female Preacher, or Memoir afSalome Lincoln (Providence, 1843; reprint. New York: Amo Press, 1972),37-38, quoted m Brekus, Strangers, 186.

66 Brekus, Strangers, 162-166,188-189; Apess, Son o/the Forest, 23, 25.

67 Pierce, Revelator, 16. Emma Hardinge Britten included a similar travelogue in her autobiography. See Britten and Wilkinson, Autobiography, 95-105.

68 Ibid., 20.

69 Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 129-132. Quotes from Abbott's Rollo at Work,' or, the Way to Be Industrious (1838; New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. n.d.), 52, 125-126; and Edgeworth's "I'd Be a Butterfly," Parley's Magazine I (1833): 91, are from Rodgers, 131-132.

70 Grammer, Wild Visions, 57-68.

71 Brekus, Strangers, 1-19; Grammer, Wild Visions, 73.

72 See Hudson Tuttle and J. M. Peebles, The Year-Book of Spiritualism for 1871; Presenting the Status of Spiritualism for the Current Year throughout the World; Philosophical, Scientific, and Religious Essays; Review of Its Literature; History of American Associations; State and Local Societies; Progressive Lyceums; Lecturers; Mediums; and Other Matters Relating to the Momentous Subject (Boston: William White and Company, 1871).

For updates click homepage here