The language of their statement was deceptively simple. Opening their resolution with the standard, one-word salutation-"Resolved"-a bloc of male citizens from the industrializing Massachusetts town of Lynn set out to set the record straight about one of America's most popu1ar nineteenth-century trance speakers. On November 17, 1857, trance medium Cora Hatch left the stage in disgrace after finding herself unable to respond satisfactorily to the challenges of several male spectators; now a large group of men had assembled spontaneously to formulate a response to her poor performance. The hastily formed body charged a committee of three respectable Lynn gentlemen business owner and Ganisonian abolitionist James N. Buffum (who later served two terms as Lynn's mayor, and was eventually elected to the state legislature in 1873), entrepreneur and former mayor Daniel C. Baker, and James E. Oliver-to draft a resolution alerting the public to the fact that Hatch had failed miserably. "We, the citizens of Lynn," their published resolution read, "who have listened to the exposition of Mrs. Cora L. V. Hatch this evening, feel it our duty to say to the public that, in our opinion, she has failed to comply with any test .,. or to give evidence of any supernatural inspiration; and we feel called upon to warn our fellow-citizens of this and other places against her impositions." Hatch, the resolution continued, had "succeeded in all other places, simply because those whose duty it was to unmask her pretensions, have allowed her to escape without a test... Let other places imitate the example set by Lynn, and the 'stupendous delusion' will soon loose [sic] its most successful advocate." The resolution was signed by John B. Alley and James E. Oliver, respectively the chainnan and secretary of the spontaneous meeting. (Alley, it turns out, was a local businessman and dignitary who rose from the ranks of humble apprenticeship to win a seat in Congress in 1859.)1

When considered against the backdrop of Cora Hatch's genuine celebrity in nineteenth-century America, such an aggressive salvo in the rhetorical war over nineteenth-century public mediumship might seem peculiar; it is not an overstatement to say Hatch was one of the most feted mediums of her time. Spiritualists saw her as something of a prodigy: she delivered her first trance lecture at the age of eleven, and within two years' time had found a position as the regular medium for a local spiritualist circle in Buffalo, New York? Yet as beloved as Hatch was among spiritualist believers, she was also a lightning rod for controversy outside the spiritualist movement, as the exchange in Lynn demonstrates. According to antagonistic reports in the Boston Daily Courier, Hatch was "a person of vast pretensions" bent on humbugging spectators. On

her first night in Lynn-a Monday-she spoke for an hour and a half, a move some spectators interpreted not only as a disingenuous attempt to prevent questions, but as "a downright imposition upon those who had been invited there to test her superhuman powers." Hatch pled illness, but, audience members observed, somehow was still' able to "rhapsod[ize] upon points that had not the most distant connection with the subject given her." By the time her second performance rolled around, the Courier recorded, a skeptical committee of spectators had determined not to allow Hatch "another opportunity to impose upon them by exhausting herself and all her time in talking upon irrelevant topics" and proposed a debate between the trance speaker and a local "scientific gentlemen" with the "Pythagorean proposition" as their subject. According to members of the committee, the proposal engendered a violent physical reaction in Hatch, causing blood to rush to her face "until it seemed ready to force its way through the pours [sic] of the skin." Still the medium forged ahead in her part of the debate. According to her opponents in the audience, however, her presentation was more "hesitating and bungling" than convincing; skeptics in the audience saw Hatch's attempts to answer their challenge as anything but satisfYing. Mentally spent after expounding for only twenty minutes "upon the merest generalities," Hatch more or less gave up, imploring her counterpart in the debate to "reply to what had been offered." 3

Her opponent's response-that she "had entirely misunderstood the subject"-no doubt shocked the young medium. According to commentators on both sides of the controversy, Hatch mistook the subject proposed by the spectator committee to be pythagoras' moral philosophy rather than his mathematical ideas. According to the spiritualist Banner of Light, this was understandable, particularly because members of the spectator committee refused to tell her precisely what they meant by the "Pythagorean proposition." The Banner carped that it showed a "lack of shrewdness, if nothing more, on the part of those gentlemen to refuse to" clarify what they meant, "if they honestly wished to test the capacities of the spirits." If the Courier saw a prudently skeptical bent in the behavior of Hatch's audience, the Banner saw only "ridicule, laughter, [and] ...invective." The "unbecoming" and "puerile" statements some members of the audience made, the Banner's editors wrote, were "disgraceful to the city of Lynn." Reminding readers that spirits likely were no better than mortals at reading minds, and thus could be excused for misunderstanding the audience's request, the spiritualist organ declared that "the beauty of (Hatch's] language and the purity of her doctrine will do good wherever there is a certain irony in how Hatch's audience responded to her performance she speaks.“4

No cultural backwater, Lynn served as a center of mediumistic activity early on in the history of the spiritualist movement.  According to contemporary observers, the town was "always awake to new and startling views" and its population was always "ready to adopt  the new and the strange."s But to the denizens of the industrializing New England community, not every spiritualist was created equal, meaning that people's responses to mediums and other believers could sometimes be remarkably inconsistent. In 1854, for instance, when Universalist-turned-spiritualist John MUITaY Spear constructed a spirit inspired machine he called the New Motive Power on Lynn's High Rock, the town simply ignored him; it was not until he took the "motor" on the road that a mob in western New York smashed it to bits. Three years later, just days after Cora Hatch's retreat under a cloud of suspicion, the people of Lynn heartily welcomed spiritualist leader Andrew Jackson Davis to town. (Davis had been to town at least once before: he claimed to have received a vision of a "spirit congress" there in 1852). Lauding Davis for his lecture, the Lynn Bay State reported that his "very respectable audience" was "much pleased with the way [he] handled" the "new and exciting subject" of spiritualism. Not so much as a hint of audience dissatisfaction could be found in the Bay State's pages.6

What happened to Cora Hatch in Lynn was reenacted time and time again in other locations, between other female trance speakers (or trance lecturers, as some called them) and mostly male audiences. Why? Reading between the lines, we can deduce that it had at least something to do with gender. Perhaps audiences simply distrusted female mediums because they thought they were intellectually weak, particularly when compared to male spiritualists like Davis. Evidence suggestst howevert that there was more at issue than gender stereotypes. As Chapters 1 and 2 demonstratedt mediums turned to a variety of strategies-namely published autobiography the new printing techno logiest and professional systems of management and marketing-in order to boost their public visibility to attract spectatorst and ultimately convince audiences of their supernatural capabilities. For female trance mediums operating in the 1850st 1860s and 1870s the sexuality became a fourth means of capturing the attention of particularly male seance audiences. Cora Hatch-like many of her female trance speaker colleagues became a sexualized being simply by performing on stage. (The early nineteenth-century American theater was sexual spacet which allowed the free mingling of prostitutes and customers, and which tended to mark women who performed on stage as sexually promiscuous.) As historian Faye Dudden has pointed outt "no amount of clean living and rectitude among actual performers has ever served to cancel the equation" between sext female playerst and the theater. So even when traditional theater owners and managers began "cleaning" things up in the 1840s and 1850s by banning prostitutest eliminating the sale of alcohol and booking matinees so that respectable (but unescorted) women could attend the theater without fear of being branded a "fallen womant" the sexualization of female performance still remained a cultural reality-it just changed venues. Banished from respectable, gender-integrated mainstream theaters, a "new kind of sexually charged entertainment for men" began to emerge primarily in the nation's working-class theaters and concert saloons, in which women performers functioned as objects of male sexual desire. 7

Female performers were not just passive objects of the male sexual gaze, however. Many women performers of the age, including some female trance mediums, actively exploited their sexuality both by displaying their bodies on stage in ways that would elicit positive reactions from male spectators and by encouraging men to perpetuate mental fantasies about them, as evidenced in erotic letters between male admirers and female mediums. Of course, the skillful deployment of female sexuality relied heavily on men being in the audience. Female mediums, it turns out, did not need to worry. Visual and written evidence from the period indicates that men not only were constantly present in trance seance audiences, but they were usually the dominant players in the internal politics of the seance. This was primarily due to shifts in the composition of the American theater audience, in which men fled the increasing numbers of women patronizing so-called "legitimate" drama theater for other forms of entertainment including, apparently, trance lectures led by female mediums. 8

As with other strategies used to gain public visibility, however, the use of sexual display by female trance mediums had its limitations, particularly when the strategy seemed to challenge the authority of local male elites or seemed to pose a moral danger to the community. Some men feared the sexual display of the trance seance and loudly fulminated against it in public. Other male elites were more subtle in their resistance, choosing to couch their concerns primarily in the language of local values. As Cora Hatch's rude welcome in Lynn makes clear, localism often became a banner around which men in positions of cultural and political power could rally, and then refortify their positions. Thus, for them, the battle over female mediumship may have been part of a cultural war over gender and sex, but it was also a struggle over who had the power in local communities and towns; mediums' sexuality became part of the cultural terrain over which male elites and female trance mediums skirmished. The suspicious frame of mind exhibited by many of these critical spectators was also molded by the simple lessons of epistemological doubt and caution they learned as they participated in nineteenth-century public culture. At a time when "artful deception" became a mainstay of popular entertainment-as well as an integral part of the nation's moral fabric-audiences indulged their democratic desire to decide for themselves "where the truth lay." This chapter, then, is about sexualized female mediums and their attentive male spectators, as well as the ways elite male critics challenged the idea of female mediumship.9

Historical evidence drawn from the spiritualist movement's promotional literature,scattered tidbits from the press, historical drawings, and the words of spiritualism's critics suggests very strongly that men-particularly from the middle class-made up a significant part of trance lecture audiences, though medium performances of all types, including materialization seances and psychic medical readings, tended to attract fairly diverse audiences. Men and women from the working and middle classes rubbed shoulders at public seances, though figures in the spiritualist press were particularly eager to establish the idea that only the most intelligent and reputable Americans attended medium shows. According to one observer, a phrenological survey of the congregation that gathered each Sunday at New York's Dodworth's Hall attested to the respectability and superior intellect of the typical public seance spectator: the "large frontal and coronal brain[s]" of those in the Dodworth's gallery indicated "a marked predominance of the intellectual and moral, over the lower or animal organs." To be sure, men and women of the highest repute did attend public medium shows. Individuals from the "court circles" made regular appearances at public seances. Indeed, at one performance to which the governor and entire legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as Boston's mayor, had been invited, more than three hundred public officeholders showed up. Three legislators who had been deputized to watch the mediwn for fraud-Amasa Walker, James M. Usher, and John Branning-even found that "the phenomena were given... with perfect fairness, and that they could not fail to publicly recognize the presence of an invincible power in these manifestations, though they could not pretend to assert what that power was. "to The powerful and influential, however, were hardly alone in peopling the nation's public seances; at the other end of the spectator spectrum were representatives of ethnic and racial minorities, the working class, and religious outliers.

A keen observer who went by the pseudonym Asmodeus and published his reports on spiritualism in the monthly Western Star noted that the typical public seance audience was really a motley bunch swept together from the nation's "highways and byways."

Watching the "young and old of both sexes, rich and poor, homely and handsome" that filed over the "dingy portal, and up [the] dingy stairs" of New York's Dodworth's Hall one evening, he observed that the crowd was a literal cross section of humanity, "party colored in [its] appearance." Pudgy aldermen were "squeezed" in between "lean brethren of the peddler type," as "gay damsel [ s] of no very dubious profession" found themselves "sandwiched" by "sweet-looking" Quakeresses and boot-lace mongers. Actors, lawyers, and doctors "hobnobbed" with youthful girls, "queer-looking lads," and bloomers "in all the hideousness of their hermaphrodite costumes," while Methodist class leaders mingled with Presbyterian elders, Baptists, Shakers, "Oriental looking maidens from Chatham Street," African Americans, and "divers other representations of 'poor humanity' in all its variousness." By the time the seance actually started, nearly eight hundred people had "united beneath the shadow of a divine republicanism," a fact that the author found strangely "touching. 10

Audience numbers at public seances of all sorts-not just trance lectures fluctuated considerably and often depended on the medium who was performing. As was mentioned earlier in this dissertation, some star mediums had the enviable ability to fill even the nation's largest lecture halls. Trance speaker Emma Hardinge Britten, for example, drew such large crowds in Cincinnati that some spectators were "compelled" to stand during her performances, and on at least one dramatic occasion (in San Francisco's Platt's Hall) she apparently lectured before an audience of two thousand viewers at once, making her the "latest sensation," according to the Banner of Light. But not every medium could expect to attract such sizable audiences to their performances.

Lesser known channelers, like Mrs. E. A. Bliss of Springfield, Massachusetts, often learned to be satisfied with more modest audiences that sometimes figured in the single or double digits. According to a brief report, Bliss was only able to command an audience of eighty people in a rural Vermont hall (though she later attracted a crowd of three hundred to an evening lecture when word of her effectiveness spread).12 Written accounts with concrete attendance figures like these, however, are actually rare finds in the historical record. More often than not, those who reported on public medium shows generally shaded toward the ambiguous when they addressed the issue of attendance, using vague terms like "vast," "overflowing," or "large" to describe their audiences.13

But what about trance speaking specifically? Where did male spectators fit into the typical public trance lecture? Most observers concluded that men formed a 'significant part of the trance lecture audience. One spiritualist wagered that men outnumbered women at least three to two at the trance lectures held at Dodworth's Hall.

Similarly, trance speakers recalled seeing large numbers of "rowdy" men in many of their seances. "It was no strange thing," remarked trance lecturer Achsa Sprague, "to see boys and rowdified young men" at her performances. (When applied to nineteenth-century audiences, the phrase "rowdy" or "rough" usually connoted "working-class.") Men also seemed to be some of the most active audience members--for good or ill. For Emma Hardinge Britten this translated into dealing with at least a dozen men who "rose from their seats" just as she began a seance in Rondout, New York, and stampeded about the room calling her a "witch." From articles in the spiritualist press we also know that Ada Coan's seance at Boston's Meionoan Theater-the seance to which the entire Massachusetts state government had been summoned-was primarily a male affair, simply by virtue of who had been invited, and that men dominated the audience at Cora Hatch's ill-fated seance in 1857.14 Even in the sparsely settled American West, men were a constant presence in trance seances, a point supported by the observations of none other than footloose writer and humorist Mark Twain.15

Visual evidence from the nineteenth century paints an even more compelling picture of the gender makeup of the trance lecture audience. In an undated drawing titled "Lecture on Spiritualism," for instance, we are treated to a fine view of a trance medium and her audience. The medium, a woman of moderate stature whose dark hair is tied with a long ribbon that extends far down her back, is standing nearly on the edge of a stage, suggesting that she is in a trance, and thus perhaps not totally aware of her surroundings. Other clues also suggest she is entranced: her eyes are tightly shut and her face is inclined slightly upward. What is more, her right arm is stretched out in front of her and her fingers are extended and arched, a pose reminiscent of a mesmerist making magnetic "passes" over a subject's body. Directly in front of her, in the foot or so that separates the medium from the stage's precipice, sit three men's hats turned upside-down.

(Perhaps the medium or her manager, presaging today's street musicians, put them there to collect donations.) Below the medium, in the gallery, sit several rows of attentive spectators. All of them that can be positively identified are men, save one. In the row directly in front of the trance lecturer, sit a slightly balding man holding tightly to a cane, another man who is looking at the medium through a pair of small spectacles, and a third man who seems to be wearing an eye patch. Someone who appears to be a woman is seated in the next row back, but men surround her. Off to the medium's right sit a young blond man who looks like he might be wearing a military uniform, an older bearded man, and a man with a thick mustache and curly hair (he is facing his bearded neighbor as if talking to him). Behind these three sits another bearded man. (There are more spectators  in the audience, but they are basically faceless due to the lack of detail given them by the artist.) 16

Men dominated the committees that tended to supervise the internal affairs of the seance. It was standard practice in trance lectures for a committee of spectators to select the lecture topic and monitor seance phenomena for fraud, be they appointed by the medium, or, as was more often the case, elected by the audience. This put male spectators in positions of leadership and authority within the context of the seance. Mark Twain maneuvered his way onto a Nevada seance committee, declaring that "the majority of the audience arose with one impulse and called my name ... I was elected, and I was glad of it." Cora Hatch regularly allowed committees of men, chosen by their peers, to act as monitors of her seances. (This happened not only at her ill-fated performance in Lynn, but also at seances in New York, Boston, and Cambridgeport.) The audience at one of Emma Hardinge Britten's trance seances designated a committee of three men-a clergyman by the name of Gage, a physician, and a newspaper reporter-to "choose a subject for her lecture," though the medium immediately challenged their choice. The committee apparently intended to test the medium's alleged powers by demanding, of all things, that she give them a spirit-guided lesson on the anatomy of the human brain. By insisting on detailed knowledge that the average nineteenth-century American without a passable scientific education was probably incapable of providing, the audience's deputies believed they had constructed the ultimate test of Britten's mediumship and had saved their neighbors from being "humbugged." Imagine their surprise, then, wheninstead of accepting the committee's terms and topic, Britten's simply refused to perform.

"Your speaker declines the subject," the medium stated flatly. "She comes not here to give you a test, but to teach [you] how to live and how to die." 17

Men's domination of seance committees seems, at least in part, to be a reflection of male political privilege in American society. Men enjoyed almost sole political power in the United States into the twentieth century. Only white men could hold public office until the 1870s, when Reconstruction finally made black male officeholding at least a semi-permanent political reality (that is, until Southern Redemptionists began using violence once again to strip blacks of political power). The franchise followed a similar course, with the right to vote slowly spreading among white men prior to the Civil War, and then being extended to men of African ancestry with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. 18 By contrast, nineteenth-century women were limited in what they could do politically. That does not mean that they stayed out of the public sphere altogether. Women often led the way when it came to political and social reform; one need only look at the composition of nineteenth-century temperance and abolitionist societies to discover that women were key players in national politics--even without the franchise.19 But the greatest gains women made in the century only came in its final few decades. Women like Judith Ellen Foster, head of the National Women's Republican Association, and Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease did not make their way into leadership positions in the nation's political parties until the 1880s. And it was not until 1920 that women were finally guaranteed the right to vote on a national scale with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. (Only a smattering of western states, including Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho, allowed women the right to vote and hold office prior to 1920.) This leads one to wonder if antebellum mediums and audiences alike just assumed that only men deserved the "office" of seance committeeman.20

 

Why did so many men congregate in the trance seance audience to begin with?

We can surmise, that it was partly due to the fact that the trance séance would have seemed familiar to a people steeped in a culture of sound and oratory. As part of a culture shaped by public speaking and other aural stimuli, spectators would have been comfortable with the seance's diversity of sounds and its emphasis on verbal communication. Everything from the noises generated by slaves and free workers on southern plantations and in northern workshops, to chatter on the streets of the nation's burgeoning cities, to the harangues of politicians on the hustings and the singing of church congregations combined to create a complex nineteenth-century American soundscape--and at its center was the exercise of public rhetoric. So important in the development and maintenance of nineteenth-century American culture was rhetoric that it became a subject of debate in its own right. As one historian has put it, prior to the twentieth century, Americans found "the splendor of words" to be "palpable, almost tactile." It makes sense, then, that someone like Daniel Webster, known for his splendid oratorical genius, would be celebrated far and wide in such a word- and speech-conscious culture? 1 The nation's trance speakers were, of course, enmeshed in this rhetorically oriented culture, and they became, not surprisingly, icons of verbal eloquence. (Their work, after all, was envisioned as the unmediated channeling of the voices of advanced spiritual beings.) Suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway, for instance, claimed that trance medium Belle Chamberlain was a better speaker than either Henry Ward Beecher or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Not far behind Chamberlain in oratorical skill was Addie Ballou, who, in Duniway's mind, was a veritable prodigy. "While we do not endorse all, or half her doctrines," the suffiagist wrote of Ballou, "we've never yet heard two men who could equal her in arguments or eloquence." Of Cora Hatch it was said she was "a natural orator" and that her "flights of elocution are bold, lofty, and sublime, beyond description.“22

Female trance mediums relied heavily on the spoken word to communicate their message of life after death. In their minds, they were merely "vehicles" through which supposed spirit speech was transmitted to mortal audiences, making words essential tools in communicating the wisdom of the spirit world to humanity. The use of speaking trumpets beginning in the 1850s points up the centrality of verbal and aural phenomena in trance medium performance. (When held up to the medium's mouth, the speaking trumpet was meant to amplify the spirit speech she allegedly channeled.) The voices mediums used in seances, however, did not always sound like their own, presenting a problem for audiences. As one historian of American religion has observed, the "sepulchral" or "unnatural" voices mediums affected inevitably raised doubts about the authenticity of their supernatural claims and gave rise to charges of ventriloquism. To these claims, trance mediums and their allies responded that regardless of how things sounded, they were influenced only by supernatural inspiration. "There are now numerous [spiritualist] apostles going forth," wrote one defender of trance lecturing,"speaking as they are moved by their own quickened intuitions, and by the powers of the eternal world.“23

There were also visual explanations for why men attended trance seances. Trance speaking offered men a chance to see women on stage without having to go to a concert saloon or similar venue. In the early nineteenth century, drama theater functioned as an "umbrella institutions" collecting under its roof not only a variety of amusements (including tragedy, farce, juggling, ballet, opera, and minstrelsy), but people' from every walk of life as well. Theatrical productions became part of a shared public culture in which men and wome~ the high and the low, and the polished and the rough, mixed promiscuously. Over the space of a few decades, however, things changed dramatically with audiences splitting along lines of class and gender. At first, the bifurcation of theatrical audiences manifested itself in a widening chasm between a gender-integrated mainstream (or "legitimate") theater and a sexually-charged "illegitimate" theater that explicitly targeted a male audience. (The latter was found mainly in concert saloons and other venues frequented mainly by working-class men.) The changes, however, did not end there. Soon the mainstream theater audience itself began to pull apart, with women becoming such an important market to theater managers that they courted female spectators with exclusive "ladies nights." At the same time, men were leaving the "legitimate" theater in droves for "greener" pastures, including the concert saloon and its overtly sexualized forms of entertainment. By the 1850s, middle-class men had found a cozy place to amuse themselves in lower-class music halls and saloons, among men from the workaday world.24 According to the author of The Night Side of New York, sailors, soldiers, bootblacks and rowdies, mixed in one Broadway saloon with men "well known

on the [stock exchange floor], in the gold room, and in private banking offices... city officers, alderman and councilmen" as well as "newspaper men." For the man who was leaving mainstream theater behind-and who wanted to be titillated by viewing entranced young women on stage--but for whom attendance at the concert saloon was too great a leap, the trance seance may have been just the place for him.25

The fact that many men went to trance seances for one principal reason-namely to see women perform on stage--is well borne out in the available evidence. Of course, not all trance speakers were female, though it is impossible to tell with any accuracy the precise gender composition of the nation's cadre of trance lecturers. The dearth of strong spiritualist institutions preceding the organization of the National Association of Spiritualists in 1893 meant that statistics regarding mediumship were rarely generated among spiritualists. Even a quick perusal of the annual spiritualist register kept by Uriah Clark, an anecdotal record in its own right, reveals that mediums were not always differentiated by sex in directories; often they were listed simply by their initials and last names, making it difficult to draw hard and fast conclusions about gender from its pages.26 Nevertheless, we know trance speaking was an attractive profession for women  with something to say-not just about the spirit realm, but about a whole host of other issues as well, including politics, ref~rm, and gender relations. And cultural conditions made trance mediumship a good fit for intelligent women. Ann Braude has compellingly argued that the predominant Victorian theory of women's natural piety, coupled with American spiritualists' enthusiasm for social and cultural innovation, opened the way for nineteenth-century women trance mediums to fashion a bold new role for themselves as religious leaders. According to Braude, "if women had special spiritual sensitivities, then it followed that they could sense spirits, which is precisely what mediums did." In the end, even though roughly equal numbers of men and women became mediums-of all types, including materialization, trance, and test mediums-the most popular trance lecturers ended up being women like Emma Hardinge Britten, Cora Hatch, Rosa Amedy, Ann Henderson, and Lizzie Doten.27

The assumed link between the female sex and supernatural virtuosity runs all the way back to the origins of spiritualism in the mysterious "rappings" ofHydesville, New  York, and the meteoric rise of Kate and Maggie Fox from relative obscurity to popularity as mediums .By the 1850s, the Foxes were greeted both as celebrities and as targets of anti-spiritualist hostility. According to a report written by sympathetic spiritualist editor Apollos Munn, one of the sisters was attacked in West Troy, New York, by "the emissaries of sectarianism" who "amused themselves ... by throwing stones through the windows" of the house where she was staying, and then "threatening to demolish" the building. The risk of violence, however, did not seem to be an effective deterrent to other potential mediums; within months of the Foxes' "discovery," other women began joining the trance medium ranks in droves, energized by the spiritual call they felt was theirs to expound the wisdom of the spirit world.28

Some men, like essayist and editor of the Home Journal Nathaniel Parker Willis, also reinforced the cultural connections between the notion of female piety and trance mediumship in his observations of Cora Hatch, though as we will later see, he also advanced a sexualized reading of Hatch's performances. In a piece he published in the Home Journal (that was then reprinted in the Banner of Light), Willis admitted that when he first saw Hatch perform, he thought of the Pauline command for women "to keep silence in the churches" (1 Corinthians 14: 34-35), and questioned Hatch's penchant for speaking about religious things in her seances. In the end, however, he concluded that no one could better explain the things of the spirit to humanity than female trance speakers.

The apostle Paul's ideas about women and spirituality seemed outdated. Hatch's "tone and manner were of an absolute sincerity of devoutness which compelled respect;" he insisted, "and, before she closed, I was prepared to believe her an exception-either that a

male spirit was speaking through her lips, or that the relative position of the sexes is not the same as in the days of St. Paul." The dominant doctrines of true womanhood and separate spheres now made women ideal candidates for mediumship. "How was it with the Corinthians?" asked Willis. "Women are certainly better than we, in these latter days, and, as standing far nearer to God, may properly speak for us, even in holy places-or so it seemed to me while listening to Mrs. [Cora] Hatch.,,29 By contrast, Willis excoriated actresses who, in his mind at least, were trying to overstep the boundaries of the nineteenth-century ideal of femininity. The "masculine" manner and clothing of one of his targets, the very popular Fanny Kemble Butler, made her a poor example for other women. "Taking into account that the aberrations of genius, like the eccentricities of character, are apt to be sooner imitated than the most exalted virtues," Willis wrote of Butler under the pseudonym "Fanny Ferret," "I do not wonder at the difference of opinion which exists as to the impressions likely to be produced upon the delicate mould of the female mind. There is a philosophy, cherished in some select circles, which needs a little watching.“30

There is a certain irony in men's spiritual elevation of female trance speakers, for even as women mediums were carving out a space for themselves as bearers of spiritual authority (with some support from men), male spectators at public seances-including Willis himself-were entangling themselves in the cultural process of sexualizing female channelers by remaking them into objects of male scopic pleasure. But men were not enforcing this procedure by themselves-female trance speakers were key players in the process as well. By exploiting their bodies in order to elicit positive, responses from the men in their audiences, they encouraged male spectators to "read" their performances through a sexuallens.31

When viewed against the backdrop of other types of nineteenth-century popular entertainment, it is not entirely surprising that male spectators tended to see women mediums as visual manifestations of their fantasies, or that women mediums often encouraged men to see them this way. In this regard, trance speakers were no different than other popular female performers of the same period; women entertainers in burlesque, vaudeville, and dramatic theater performances all experienced the weight of sexual objectification over the span of the long nineteenth century, while often also encouraging it through their performances. The rise in the 1860s of what some scholars have called "feminized spectacle" was built, according to scholar Robert Allen, on a foundation of "female sexual display," with each form containing "its own strategies for.. producing male scopic pleasure." The stage spectacle The Black Crook, for instance, was hailed in the New York Clipper, the nation's premier theatrical trade periodical, as an "undress piece of a model... character," no doubt because it made rank use of tight fitting and low-cut costuming. Everybody, the Clipper declared, "is talking of it and the many beauties it reveals to our bewildered gaze." Other forms of sexualized spectacle particularly the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century form of performance known as acrobatics-relied on the interweaving of athleticism and the hint offemale nudity in order to titillate audiences. Gymnast Ruth Budd's habit of revealing naked arms and legs from behind a curtain elicited favorable reviews from the men in her audience.32

In the case of burlesque, there were some businessmen who opted to produce and market so-called "clean" shows, or performances that downplayed the sexual display of female bodies, but most managers and producers eventually opted to construct their shows around female sexual spectacle. Even in the realm of the middle-class dramatic theater, managers who were developing what became know as the "model artist" show quickly grasped the financial rewards of displaying women's bodies on stage. Similar to the old tableau vivante tradition, the model artist show placed mostly women-dressed only in skin-tight leotards so as to create the impression of nudity-in poses reminiscent of classical paintings and sculpture. The enthusiastic response from male spectators of all classes was undeniable. Male audiences, energized by the thought of glimpsing a semi nude woman, overran theaters, opera glasses and telescopes in hand. The visual strategy that producers of the model artist show utilized was destined to be a big hit, which makes their crusade to sanitize the nineteenth-century playhouse by expelling the prostitutes who had become fixtures there all the more ironic.33

What part did female performers themselves play. in creating the forms of sexualized entertainment they presented to male spectators? According to Faye Dudden, some actresses understood that they could manipulate men in the audience by "developing gestures laced with sexual overtones." Thus, Sarah Timm, an actress who performed regularly at New York's Olympic Theater, was known to make men fawn over her with "familiar" glances and winks, while Mary Taylor, also a popular actress, drew men in with her oblique, but tender looks. Some female performers, however, did not stop at gestures and glances, choosing to go a step further and utilize their bodies as a means of winning and keeping the attention of men in the audience. Adah Isaacs Mencken, whose performance of the horse melodrama Mazeppa became a breakout hit in 1860 and apparently made her-momentarily, at least-the highest-paid actress in the world, was particularly adept at capturing and cultivating spectator interest this way.

Realizing, in Dudden's words, that "her body was a realizable asset," Mencken worked "to cash in on it." Often in her performances she wore skimpy clothing or flesh-colored tights to give the appearance of nudity. She also allowed herself to be photographed for risque cartes de visites that were distributed outside the entrance to her shows. Lydia Thompson and her "British Blondes" burlesque troupe, which first performed in the United States in 1868, likewise flaunted their bodies for male audiences, though their use of sexual display was more understated than Mencken's. Their suggestive dancing, kinetic leg kicking, and almost excessively long, golden hair seemed designed to invite men's sexual interest without overtly resorting to nudity. In later years, this boundary broke down, creating new space for other forms of performance, like the striptease and cooch dance, that purposefully showcased undraped female bodies.34

Like Mencken and Thompson, actress Laura Keene also discovered the benefits of sexualized bodily display. Born in London, Keene moved to America and took to the stage to escape a troubled past. Within a few years of her arrival, she was managing a New York City theater and acting on the side. One of her most talked-about shows, The Seven Sisters, relied heavily on "short-petticoated ladies" and "a hundred miscellaneous legs in flesh-colored tights." The protagonist of Keene's play (really a play-within-a play) was Diavoline, daughter of Pluto, god of the underworld, who, while visiting New York, ends up falling in love with a young male playwright. Diavoline helps the man produce his play, after which she and her six sisters act in it. The production was so popular that it ran for more than two hundred performances. According to actress and theater observer Clara Morris, the costumes worn by the corps de ballet in The Seven Sisters were quite revealing for the times, consisting of flesh-colored tights and waists, skirts that reached to just below the knee, and plunging necklines that were cut two or three inches below the collarbone.35

Evidence from the historical record suggests that what men sought from public seances was not all that different from what male viewers looked for in burlesque, model artist shows, and other sexualized theatrical productions, even if the forms of performance themselves differed dramatically. Several men openly admitted to fantasizing about Achsa Sprague long after she departed their towns; one even confessed that she visited him in his "imagination" in "the quiet hours of the night.“ 36 Other male viewers tried to hide their fascination with the bodies of female mediums by commenting on the women's mental and spiritual abilities. Nathaniel Willis's high praise for Cora Hatch's "tone and manner" alluded to above suggests that he considered her to be a spiritual being, yet he seemed genuinely tom between competing religious and sexual readings of her performance. By paying particular attention to Hatch's physical appearance, Willis underscored the scopic, sensual pleasure he derived from watching her. Careful to catalog every part of her body visible to him, the man thrilled at the sight of the adolescent female medium-or as he referred to her, the "delicate-featured blonde." By lingering on the appearance of Hatch's "bare arms," her "flaxen ringlets" that framed a set of feminine shoulders, and her "eyes and fingers [that were in] no way nervous," Willis created an idealized physical representation of the young woman for himself. Other observers also emphasized Hatch's physical charms. "She is seventee years old," wrote one, "of medium height, delicately fonned and possessed of an etherial [sic] beauty, which may not at once attract but enlist the admiration of the beholder." A correspondent for Frank Leslie's lllustrated Newspaper waxed even more eloquent, paying particular attention, as Willis did, to the medium's blond hair. Hatch was, the writer recalled, "a fair and slender girl, on whose flowing ringlets seventeen summers sit with light and easy grace.“37

Other observers also acknowledged similar feelings in private correspondence and public print alike. A letter from one Robert Greer reprinted in Cora Hatch's 1895 authorized biography repeated (and amplified) some of Willis's observations and lauded the young medium for her "divine" physicality. "I well recollect my pleasure," Greer recalled in his letter, "at seeing, on the rostrum ... a woman... with clear cut features and sweet blue eyes, radiant with beauty" and whose head was "crowned by a rich profusion of pretty blond hair" that fell from her "perfect typical head, in graceful ringlets upon her shoulders." Such a sight fairly caused his "heart [to] throb with sacred emotion and gratitude to the Spirit realm," and made him want to "possess" the "lovely, fairy" woman.

We, in the twenty-first century, may wink and snicker at such saccharine language, yet the syrupy words suggest rather convincingly that Greer's interest in Hatch went far beyond the spiritual. The same can be said for the lapsed male channeler, whose anonymous anti-spiritualist expose, Corifessions of a Medium, was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1860, and laid bare for its readers the author's passionate feelings for  a teenaged medium named Abby Fetters. Fetters, a "pale delicate creature, with blond hair and light blue eyes," caught the attention of the author for the first time when she was assigned to sit next to him at a private seance. At that seance, they touched (her hand rested on his above the seance table) and immediately the author of the Confessions felt a light electrical current "passing from the hand of Miss Fetters through my own into the table." The table awakened and began to buck and dance, but the man's attention apparently never left the young woman at his side. Carefully watching her every move, the author described her physical response to the seance using language laced with orgiastic eroticism: Fetters's "breath came quick and short" and her cheeks "lost every trace of color," until, "as ifby spasmodic effort," she took her hands off the table and collapsed into a "seat ... exhausted." All through the seance, the young woman remained trapped in the male participant's gaze. For him, Fetters functioned less as a spiritual guide and more as an object of his sensual, scopic gratification.38

These public declarations of sexual curiosity and interest were hardly new among observers of spiritualist phenomena in the late 1850s and 1860s-they developed concurrently with spiritualism. As early as 1850, two years after Kate and Maggie Fox "discovered" spirits rapping on the walls of their home, they found themselves the subject of a titillating report published in the Spiritual Philosopher, a short-lived Boston paper edited by LaRoy Sunderland. According to the article, a "gentleman by the name of Davies" had proposed that a "committee of matrons" examine the Fox sisters "to ascertain  whether the knockings were produced by machinery concealed about the person." The examination that ensued must have been humiliating. First, the young women were forced to strip down to their undergarments, after which the deputized "matrons" poked and prodded them in an attempt to find some kind of device that could account for the raps the girls were known for producing. When the examiners found nothing, the Foxes were then "placed in a variety of positions, and still the sounds were heard, while the most careful watching failed to detect any physical movements which could account for their production." In the end, the examining women's report declared that they could find no naturalistic explanation for the raps. Davies must have been disappointed by the results of the examination, but there was a silver lining in it for him. By publicizing the report (in addition to getting it published in the Spiritualist Philosopher, he appears to have read it in public at least once), Davies was able to subject the Foxes to the sexual scrutiny and prying eyes and ears of the American public.39

Male managers of female mediums apparently perceived the opportunities for financial reward the sexual display of female trance lecturers had to offer and enthusiastically exploited them. Particularly adept at doing this was Benjamin Hatch, Cora Hatch's manager and erstwhile husband. In 1858, Hatch ghostwrote and published one of Cora's first books on spiritualism, Discourses on Religion, Morals, Philosophy and Metaphysics, using it to paint a vivid (even erotic) written portrait of the young woman. At the book's core was Hatch's desire for readers to create a mental fantasy of his teenaged wife. "Let the reader imagine before him a young, fair, and delicate form," he wrote, "whose every expression is beaming with intelligence and animation, whose attitude is the most graceful, whose voice is not loud but full and distinct... and whose every gesture is in perfect keeping with the harmony and purity which characterize both her soul and body, and then He may have some idea of the eagerness with which the listener catches every word as it falls from the lips of the speaker." A phonographic recording of Cora Hatch's trance lectures simply could not do her justice, Benjamin Hatch claimed, because her charms were primarily visual. Her attitude, her gestures, and "the peculiar expression of her countenance" simply could not be captured on a wax cylinder. But they could be captured through the eye.40

Against such a backdrop, the mooning of male spectators over female trance mediums like Cora Hatch becomes both more interesting and more significant. To comprehend the consequences of the scopophilic posture of the male seancegoer, as well as to put some theoretical flesh on the thematic bones of female trance performance, it might be useful to turn very briefly to the realm of feminist film criticism, paying special attention to the seminal contributions Laura Mulvey made to the field. In her now famous essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), Mulvey elaborated on Freud by showing the gendered ways in which the human unconscious "structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking." She concluded that in societies marked by sexual imbalance, scopophilic gratification has been split between the active male gaze and the passive female object of the gaze. In this formulation, the male subject "projects" his fantasy onto the "female figure," who, in turn, assumes the passive role of spectacle. Incinema, the function of the female figure can be summed up by the term, "to-be-Iooked at-ness;" she "holds the look," Mulvey argued, while she "plays to and signifies male desire. ,,41 As other feminists working in the field of film criticism have shown, Mulvey's universalistic theorization of male spectatorship is not without its limitations. Feminist critics have roundly criticized Mulvey for all but dismissing the existence of the female spectator, as well as for focusing too narrowly on the sadism of the male spectatormay also question how some of Mulvey's conclusions translate to non-cinematic media and popular performance. Nevertheless, her ideas can give us a sense of the cultural consequences of the male spectator's objectifying gaze.42

We should exercise some caution, though, when following this line of interpretation, and not take it too far, as we could easily end up seeing female trance speakers solely as passive recipients of the male gaze. We must remind ourselves that, like actresses of the same period, nineteenth-century female mediums themselves were also key actors in the drama of sexualization. They actively pursued sex as a strategy for generating spectator attention, though, not surprisingly, they were never willing to admit to it publicly. The spiritualist seance provided both the space and opportunity for such a process to take place. Even as the seance granted female mediums unprecedented, if  unconventional, spiritual authority and self-determination, it also undennined old social norms and behaviors, freeing trance speakers to flirt with male spectators and use their physical appearances to gain performative and economic advantage in the public sphere.

In this context, female mediums like Cora Hatch, while not resorting to overt nudity as a strategy for capturing the male spectator's interest (as many other female performers were beginning to do), still dressed and acted in ways that were meant to educe erotic attention from men. Hatch's hair and youth, for instance, were her hooks. (Her hair alone elicited some of the most redolent language used to describe the features of any female trance lecturer.) Of course, not all men made female trance lecturers into targets of sexual fantasy, and not all female trance mediums encouraged the sexual interest of men. Achsa Sprague's papers are full of letters from men who lauded her spiritual acumen and barely mentioned her physical appearance, something Sprague seems to have appreciated.

Nevertheless, even she was forced to fight off one romantic advance after another from men who saw her on stage and claimed to fall in love with her-though in her writings she appears not to have done anything to encourage them. One male admirer wrote in a saccharine love letter to Sprague: "I have no evil design in caressing you in the way I do, it comes from the bottom of my heart. I have told you I loved you ... better than I do all womankind." Evidence shows that Sprague received at least five marriage proposals in the mail after starting her career as a medium (three of the proposals even arrived in a single two-week period)-potent evidence of the powerful part fantasy played in the politics ofmediumship.43

Spectators, of course, are free to reject the messages and strategies performers may heartily wish them to accept. Trance seance audiences were not unique in this regard. Indeed, the ritual of trance speaking was always subject to the agency and interpretation of the audience, and some spectators Goined by literary and journalistic opponents of trance mediumship) used their agency to resist the performances they witnessed because of their perceived connection to female mediums' sexuality. Such an overt emphasis on bodily display, these critics argued, ran counter to accepted Victorian standards of behavior; women were supposed to be passionless, discreet, and morally unimpeachable. Making negative rhetorical use of the sexuality of female channelers, male critics joined forces in nailing female mediums to the cross of sexual deviance anddowngraded trance speakers until they were objects of repulsion and danger. In his book Spiritualism Versus Christianity (1856), J. W. Daniels argued that the sexual proclivities of mediums made it easy for them to accept the appalling idea that "affinital relations"

between lovers were actually superior to legal marriage. For those who wondered about the potential consequences of this kind of thinking, Daniels offered the blunt answer that it would ultimately lead to personal degradation and faniilial destruction. "Wives and husbands," Daniels wrote, "will be rendered miserable, alienated, parted, and their families broken up." Yes, "spiritual matches" would be made, "carnal degradations, and Warren to Achsa Sprague, 16 February 1860, A WS; and Braude, Radical Spirits, 110, all the ultimate wretchedness thence inevitably resulting," but such relationships would incur a heavy social price-namely the undermining of the family.44

Ironically, at about the same time Daniels was taking aim at mediums, so too was Benjamin Hatch. His tell-all pamphlet, published in 1859, after his ugly divorce from Cora Hatch, was a forceful attack on the nation's mediums and their alleged moral failings. In the pamphlet, which was given the supercilious title Spiritualists' Iniquities Unmasked, he promised to "cleanse" the movement by laying open the "abcesses [sic] of social and moral corruption" that were rotting spiritualism from the inside. Hatch, whose young wife left him amidst allegations that he had taken advantage of her financially and sexually, spared no one in his anti-spiritualist screed, but female trance speakers seemed to suffer the greatest ignominy under his pen. (It was as if he reserved his nastiest verbiage for those who reminded him most of Cora.) Of the four hundred mediums he reckoned were operating in the United States in 1859, more than a fourth had dissolved "their conjugal relations" in favor of monogamous adultery or "promiscuous concubinage." One of them was the well-known Ada Coan, who, Hatch charged, abandoned her seriously ill husband "without any apparent cause." Worse yet were the actions of Julia Branch and a medium he called Mrs. Albertson. According to Hatch, Brimch was living with free lovers in New York, after already having had two husbands, while Albertson left her spouse to live a life of moral dissipation. "Now," he wrote, she "changes her 'affinities' with almost every new moon, sometimes more frequent." For Hatch- these and numerous other examples drove home the point that trance mediumship was a sure path to sexual immorality. "No trance medium," he insisted, "has ever gone before the public and maintained an upright and honorable life.“45

The Politics of Local Resistance: Male Elites Challenge Female Trance Speaking As convincing as it may have been to many Americans, the moralistic rhetoric of Daniels- Hatch, and others like them only partly accounts for the rejection Cora Hatch and other female mediums experienced. A close examination of the poor treatment female trance speakers regularly suffered suggests that something more than supposed sexual depravity was at issue in men's resistance to seance phenomena. Sex undoubtedly was part of the equation-the male Lynnites who shouted Cora Hatch down likely feared the sexual aura she projected-but it was only one element in a larger constellation of concerns related to the eroding power oflocal male elites. It would have been one of the "red flags" that influential men could point to in order to claim the corrosive effects of female mediumship, but it would not have been the only one. In exercising their human agency, local male elites chose to reject the use of sexuality as a way of attracting public attention by subsuming it under the banner of local control and local values. When they argued that female mediums had no place in their communities, they were rejecting  female medium's exploitation of sexuality, but they were ultimately making it part of a larger question of who had power over their towns.

Prior to the 1870s, America was still a society of local (or what one historian has labeled "island") communities. Communication between these "islands" was weak at best, cultural authority was still located in the hands of local elites, and the notion of acentralized national government was virtually inconceivable. The end of the century, however, brought with it a variety of social and cultural forces-including rampant industrialization, corporate monopolies, political centralization, and urban migration that eroded the autonomy of local communities and power brokers. Still, writes historian Robert Wiebe, "the illusion of [elite] authority ... endured" and "innumerable townsmen continued to assume they could harness the forces of the world to the destiny of their community.“46 Community authorities still held tightly to the Jeffersonian notion that localism was the key to democracy. None other than that famous observer of the fledgling American nation, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed that every village and town"forms a sort of republic habituated to governing itself." Of course, some nineteenth century communities disintegrated as people, looking for new opportunities, moved westward, but it must be remembered that repeat migrants did not necessarily constitute the majority of the nation's population, and even westward migrants tended to move together with friends and relatives, forming new communities when they reached the frontier. The town still remained the locus of American society at least into the 1880s and 1890s, and it was there that economic and social success was fostered and achieved. 47

Each mid-nineteenth-century American town possessed its own set of agreed upon values, and as one historian has explained, those local values tended to be fostered under the "custodianship" oflocal elites. These elites patrolled the cultural, political, and social borders of their communities, defining what was and was not acceptable for their towns. Naturally, local elites did not always speak: with one voice. This was particularly the case in the realm of political competition. The advent of mass political parties in the  1830s and 1840s threatened to divide towns and villages into permanent partisan camps.

Politics, however, remained rooted in the local context, at least until mid-century, and could not so easily destroy the deeply personal patterns of the nation's social life. Indeed, politics remained a relatively stable field of experience due to the persistence of a localist ethic among Americans. Problems continued to be solved within local communities "under the leadership of an unspecialized elite.“48

With social and geographical fluidity on the rise throughout the nineteenth century, and average citizens finding themselves freer to define their own futures, the localism of American elites provided fertile ground for an American culture of social suspicion to sprout up. The traditional moorings of home and farm were no longer strong  enough to keep young men and women from packing their meager belongings into a knapsack or carpetbag and lighting out for the promise of a factory or office job in the nearest city. Flocking to New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and a host of smaller cities and towns, like Lowell, Massachusetts, men and women began carving out new lives away from family and familiar surroundings. (To underscore this point, it is worth noting that the majority of Lowell's largely female workforce came almost entirely from New England agricultural towns.)49 But behind the veneer of this new age of opportunity also lurked tremendous threats, including perhaps two of the most sinister of social archetypes: the confidence man and the painted woman. As so many victimized citizens learned the hard way, any trust one had in these shady creatures was sorely misplaced, as they would eagerly seduce, rob, cheat, or trick the innocent and then chuckle about it afterwards.

Who would protect the nation's communities from such unscrupulous characters and others like them? The task seemed to fall to cultural and social boundary-keepers.Nineteenth-century advice writers and other cultural policemen warned of the danger of the confidence man and painted woman. They were not what they appeared to be- these authorities cautioned- for on the outside they affected the appearance of unquestionable respectability and sincerity- but behind the f~ade of gentility and friendliness prowled real scoundrels. In his Seven Lectures to Young Men (1844), Hemy Ward Beecher admonished his young readers to be diligent in detecting and avoiding the seductions of these con artists; in fact, Beecher's sole purpose in publishing the lectures was- in his words, "to raise the suspicion of the young- and to direct their reason to the arts by which" seducers and thieves would try to destroy them. Yet, for all of his or her dark power to spark panic among the republic's citizens~ the roguish urban trickster really was not much more than a symptomatic manifestation of a larger sociocultural problem. If we peel back the layers of cultural information and meaning behind the symbolic images of the confidence man and painted woman- we are bound to discover that what truly was at issue was the erosion oflong-held "certainties" about public trust and sincerity- and that the age's suspicious mindset was simply an outgrowth of that reality.50

The explosion of literature on social detection and "city reading" in the nineteenth century underscores this assessment. It comes as no surprise that secret criminality quickly became a major subject in this increasingly important geme. The urban guidebooks that became fixtures on the American literary landscape in the years leading up to the Civil War promised to rescue honest citizens from social victimization by helping them recognize and navigate the concealed deceptive intentions of the urban criminal element. Members of the nation's felonious underworld might be nearly perfect masters of disguise, skillfully snaring their victims by closely imitating the look and conduct of respectable men and women, but they still could be discovered and exposed.

While the task of detection might be difficult (and professional policemen admitted that only a carefully trained eye could pick out the counterfeits) the realization that social fakes could be rooted up and thrust into the bright light of public scrutiny spawned a flurry of police-authored books on American criminality replete with an assortment of photographic rogues' galleries. 51

Other forms of literary detection were far less concerned with the world of secret villainy than with uncovering and detailing the more mundane ways that people were undermining public trust and personal authenticity in American society. As Karen Halttunen has skillfully shown, hypocrites lurked in the comers of every nineteenth century American parlor. According to Halttunen, the middle-class Americans sought to prove their "gentility" by both demonstrating their clear grasp of the "art of politeness" and exhibiting "virtually flawless physical and emotional self-restraint." Unfortunately, this ideal was nearly impossible to achieve, in part because genteel self-restraint ran against the grain of the reigning ideal of personal transparency and true sincerity in self expression; on the one hand, men and women were charged with being themselves emotionally and physically-while on the other they were expected to suppress their true feelings and actions. The spate of etiquette manuals that began to tind their way into middle-class homes in the 1830s promised a solution to this problem by outlining the rules that would make one "polite," while still insisting on full sincerity in every public encounter. The problem with rules, though, was that they did not necessarily guarantee personal authenticity; a hypocrite could be just as scrupulous in following the rules of politeness as a "true" gentleman or gentlewoman. In light of this reality, simple homegrown suspicion was the average American's most potent defense against the threats of criminal and social imposture. But, as many scholars of nineteenth-century America have shown, it was local elites who really patrolled the cultural and social borders of the community, keeping track of potential coercion and imposture.52

What suspicious seancegoers-like the ones who challenged Cora Hatch in Lynn in 1857-were doing was loeal boundary maintenance. One need only look at the professions and offices of the Lynn men who publicly opposed Hatch-future congressmen and state legislators, influential businessmen, local authors--to realize how high the stakes were in maintaining the existing borders of cultural authority in the town.

Hatch, and those like her, threatened to upset the status quo. But it was not just her claims to spiritual authority that threatened the men who shouted her down. It was also the fact that she was a woman who actively flaunted her looks. (Compare Lynn's warm welcome of Andrew Jackson Davis with Hatch's public disgrace. There clearly was a gendered valence to their concerns.)

Historians have shown that by the nineteenth century American women were making great strides in gaining a modicum of cultural authority for themselves, a development that struck fear into many men's hearts. Using the prerogatives that came with being the supposedly purer sex, women reformers in the antislavery, temperance, and women's rights movements were able to claim a significant role in helping to reshape American society. Shut out of other paths to intellectual creativity and economic power, women were also increasingly able to claim cultural power for themselves in their domination of the realm of American Victorian literature. (Think of Louisa May Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.) Women, these writers argued, could exercise significant influence on their families, neighbours, and the rest of society by wholeheartedly embracing their role as mothers and moral instructors.

Some male elites welcomed this kind of thinking and supported the informal exercise of female cultural power for explicitly moral ends. Yet, many men in positions of local power and prestige saw these women as an unmistakable threat to male privilege and cultural power that had to be stopped. Thus, they resisted the idea of the powerful or influential woman, dismissing her as power hungry, culturally dangerous, or, worse yet, Male critics of female mediums employed these dismissive strategies with special vigor. An article from the Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, a weekly periodical published in Boston and edited by the influential Universalist Thomas Whittemore, seemed to represent the views of many influential local men'. Referring to the mediumship of Kate and Maggie Fox, the article's author (perhaps it was Whittemore himself) pointed out that he had "no faith" in them, not only because he had never heard the "rappings" they allegedly heard in their Hydesville home, but also because he objected to "running after young ladies"-an insinuation that young women either were socially and culturally dangerous and could not be trusted, or were spiritual lightweights.54 Medical men like physician William Alexander Hammond went a step further, describing female mediums as either cunning experts in sleight-of-hand techniques or fragile "persons of impressionable nervous systems" and neurologically disturbed somnambulists. This provided local male elites with effective rhetorical ammunition-stamped with the imprimatur of medical expertise-to use against "uppity" female mediums.56

The other strand of American culture that informed the suspicious stance of local male elites was an epistemological skepticism that came out of the naturalism and commonsense empiricism of the American Enlightenment.56 One can see this  development especially well in the world of nineteenth-century popular entertainment.

Magic shows, public exhibitions of trompe l'oeil paintings, the display of Barnumesque hoaxes in dime museums-these and other forms of entertainment helped remake the United States into a nation of self-conscious cultural detectives focused on deriving conclusions about the world around them through empirical evidence. As historian James Cook has suggested, the popular culture of the age became something of a "perceptual contest played out between showman and viewer." In the face of such entertainments as P. T. Barnum's deceptive exhibitions of Joice Heth and the Feejee Mermaid, spectators learned to approach popular performances and exhibitions with one eye always open to the possibility of fraud and their minds always prepared to deconstruct what they saw.S7 Indeed, Barnum wrote in his Humbugs of the World (1865), the average citizen was so unwilling to believe his claims "that there were more persons humbugged by believing too little than too much. Many persons have such a horror of being taken in, or such an elevated opinion of their own acuteness, that they believe everything to be a sham, and in this way are continually humbugging themselves." Not that he could complain; Barnum and others like him actively cultivated this suspicious stance, in part because it prolonged public debate and lengthened people's interest in what he was peddling. Why not let the audience decide and leave it at that, they reasoned? On its face, the choice of nineteenth-century showmen to cede decision-making authority to the audience empowered the spectator. But their move also sparked a fundamental rethinking of American popular culture in which, according to Cook, "deception (artful and otherwise) came to be understood as an intrinsic component of the commercial entertainment industry." Audiences and showmen together created a new value system in which "womes about deception ..were positively endemic.”58

Audiences became savvier with each Barnumesque performance they attended. Out of sheer embarrassment, they may have wanted to forget the experience of being "taken in" by unscrupulous tricksters, but they were not ready to forget the hard lessons they had learned, and many certainly wanted to steer clear of being humbugged the next time around. Popular science, it turns out, gave them some perceptual tools for avoiding future trickery. Lifted from its original context and reinterpreted by a broader public, the "scrupulous empiricism" of Francis Bacon, the seventeenth-century thinker, became a handy way for nineteenth-century Americans to separate truth from error. According to the Baconian method, the key to understanding the world was to collect facts systematically through one's own senses, rather than through speculative guesswork, and then draw conclusions based on the collected data. In real-world terms, this meant that even non-scientists could detect truth based on their own study and observation. Thanks to knowledge gained through newspapers, lyceum lectures, and the book trade even common folk were beginning to apply Baconianism to situations from everyday life. 59

P.T. Barnum's exchange with a woman he referred to cryptically as "Mrs. H." is a case in point. According to Barnum, Mrs. H. accosted him after carefully observing the golden angel fish that swam in his American Museum aquarium: "You can't humbug me, Mr. Barnum; that fish is painted!" "Nonsense!" said I, with a laugh; "the thing is impossible!" "I don't care, I know it ispainted; it is as plain as can be." "But, my dear Mrs. H., paint would not adhere to a fish while in the water; and if it would, it would kill him. Besides," I added, with an extra serious air, "we never allow humbugging here!" "Oh, here is just the place to look for such things," she replied with a smile; "and I must say I more than half believe that Angel Fish is painted. "

Mrs. H., who had dutifully exercised her senses in observing the fish, truly believed that Barnum or one of his cronies had painted the animal gold. A true empiricist, she stuck with the conclusion that seemed to fit the data she had been able to observe: Barnum's fish was gold, other fish she had seen were not, therefore the fish had to have been painted. Her logic of course was flawed, but in a century when scientific knowledge of exotic species was still minimal, we need to understand that Mrs. H. was simply making up her mind based on her own experience and the data available to her.6o

What Mrs. H. was doing in Barnum's American Museum, men (and women) were likewise doing in the public medium show. Also heavily influenced by Baconian thought and hard lessons learned from Barnumesque entertainment, séance goers actively looked for reasonable, commonsensical ways to understand what they were seeing. Trance lectures were especially suspect. As early as the 1850s, observers of the supernatural had begun to question the authenticity of trance manifestations. In his book, Trance and Correlative Phenomena (1868), reformer and erstwhile spiritualist LaRoy Sunderland concluded that mediumistic trances were actually self-induced; it was the suggestion that spirits were behind entrancement, not real spirits, he argued, that triggered the trance state. By the 1870s and 1880s, scientific experts began joining critics like Sunderland in casting doubt on the supposed supernaturalism of the trance state. Noted neurologist George Miller Beard, best known as the originator of the concept of neurasthenia, was particularly assiduous in promoting the idea that trance was a subjective condition; for Beard, the trance state was nothing more than a "functional disease of the nervous system." No one could become entranced through supernatural means, argued Beard, least of all spiritualist trance speakers. Following Sunderland's logic, Beard agreed that "all... trance preachers and speakers" induced entrancement themselves.61

Such ideas appear to have trickled down to the general public. Spectators at one New York meeting where the spirits of William Shakespeare and Henry Clay allegedly spoke through a trance medium expressed some deep-seated doubts regarding the manifestations. One John Wax reported a similar response from one of his friends in the pages of the Banner of Light. According to Wax, he and his friend, Inphant Flaggabus (an obvious alias meant to protect the friend's identity), attended one of Cora Hatch's trance lectures, where Flaggabus apparently was moved by the young woman's speech. "My friend," Wax wrote, "paid great attention to the fair speaker, [and] declared hersentiments to be pure, common sense Christianity." But when Wax told him she had delivered the lecture while entranced, Flaggabus quickly reversed himself. "He was skeptical," Wax recorded. "As it was, he said, it could not be." Denying that there was any evidence that could prove the lecture was delivered through supernatural means, the friend gave "the credit of this truly excellent discourse to the lady speaker," not the spirits.62

To give a human face to the various strands of suspicious localism and epistemological skepticism we have been dealing with, let us briefly return to the details of the story that began this chapter and the career of Cora Hatch's chief nemesis in Lynn, Alonzo LeWis. Dubbed the "Bard" ofLynn by some, Lewis was the town's leading intellectual, though, ironically, he never received a college education. A poet, historian, surveyor, and schoolmaster, Lewis turned out to be something of a nineteenth-century Renaissance man, or better yet, a beneficiary of the "democratization of knowledge" or "Village Enlightenment" that sprouted up from the radical residue of the American Revolution. It turns out that the social and political upheaval caused by the Revolution had positive ramifications for common people (particularly men), by ,empowering non-elites and opening the way for them to participate fully in the discourse of the Enlightenment and, in Lewis's case, eventually claim cultural elite status. Normal citizens challenged the cultural authority of a college-educated intellectual elite not only by assimilating the best thinking of the age through a burgeoning post-Revolutionary market for books, newspapers, and other printed goods, but also by publishing and circulating their own work.63

Around Lynn, Alonzo Lewis was recognized as one of those especially talented thinkers who enlarged the borders of the town's intellectual life. By the age of twenty nine, he had published his first book of poems (and then two more before 1834) and had served a short stint as editor of the Record (a newspaper that got its start in 1830), but it was the publication of his magisterial 1829 History of Lynn, updated and republished in 1865 by James R. Newhall, that was his crowning achievement. (Still used by historians today, the History became the definitive work on Lynn and its environs.) The young, self-taught intellectual, however, was not content to just publish, choosing instead to apply his learning to real life-a standard Baconian move.64 It is probably unfair to label him an inveterate rabble-rouser, though he did jump on nearly every activist bandwagon that rolled across nineteenth-century New England. He waded headlong into the 'world of labor politics, supporting striking workers with his poetic gift. When Lynn's shoemakers walked off the job in 1860, Lewis published his "Cordwainer's Song" which encouraged the workers to stand fast against the police who had been called out to break them. Lewis wrote: Shoemakers of Lynn, be brave! Renew your resolves again; Sink not to the state of slave, But stand for your rights like men.

(The song probably energized the shoemakers, but unfortunately they were unable to sing it at a victory celebration; within the space of a few months the strike petered out and a handful of its leaders were arrested.) In addition to his dabbling in labour politics, Lewis also developed a taste for phrenology and became a prime mover in organizing Lynn's anti-slavery and temperance societies (he briefly edited an anti-slavery paper in Lynn before William Lloyd Garrison's better known Liberator began rolling off the presses).

Judging from this and other evidence, Lewis's gifts are beyond dispute, but as James  Newhall observed, his talents unfortunately could not rescue him from too local a reputation. Still, he persevered in his smallish sphere, hammering away at ignorance and narrow-mindedness by demanding that people like Cora Hatch provide factual evidence for their claims. Among his friends and neighbors in Lynn, he was a sort of local folk hero. 65

Lewis was surrounded by his allies and acquaintances at the Hatch performance: he and John B. Alley, whom the Lynn audience had voted in as chairman of the proceedings, ran in the same anti-slavery circles, while James N. Buffum, who laid out part of the city and had been appointed by the audience in the Hatch performance to be one of three drafters of the resolution that opened this part, undoubtedly rubbed shoulders with the "bard" at some point.66 Alley and Buffum too rejected the young medium's claims, and formed something like a united front against her in the séance.

They all had something to lose-including the cultural authority they enjoyed-in theevent that Cora Hatch gained the town's favour. Thus, Lewis made her a special target of his intellect. He hesitated to challenge her right off, preferring to let others like Unitarian pastor Charles Shackford and a local school teacher, Mr. Moore, first pick her apart by pointing out the factual errors in her trance discourse. But then he stepped into the intellectual fray by posing two apparently elementary mathematical questions. He first  asked if two converging lines could extend to infinity without meeting-a trick question by the looks of it-while in his second query he wondered aloud if knowing the diameter of a circle could yield the circumference. The first question elicited a clear "no" from the spirits, the second a "yes." At this point, Lewis confidently declared he was "satisfied" that both questions were answered incorrectly. "Any boy who has been to a good grammar school, who has studied mathematics," Lewis reportedly said, "could have answered those questions correctly." (Here he seemed to almost be saying that even the youngest boy with a common school education could best an older girl, whatever her schooling, in an intellectual contest.) The "spirits" persisted, promising to give Lewis a demonstration in thirty days' time of a mathematical rule that used the diameter of a circle to find its circumference. Unconvinced, Alonzo Lewis left the seance as he had entered it-a skeptic. To some, Hatch's supporters in the spiritualist movement included, the poet-historian's judgment of the young medium was a knee-jerk reaction to something he simply did not understand, while others no doubt saw him as a mean-spirited misogynist who liked to belittle bright young women because they threatened to outshine men like him. There may be something of both explanations in his response. For him, though, the seance was also an event ripe for empirical testing, with questions and first, hand observation functioning as his tools. Unwilling, the Banner of Light tells us, to brook long-winded answers from alleged spirits, Lewis stayed true to Baconian ideals of factual evidence and careful examination Lengthy explanations, he believed, threatened to muddy the factual waters and obscure the simple truth he sought; he would only accept "yes" or "no" for answers, and when those answers ended up contradicting accepted scientific knowledge, he ruled them to be in error. 67

Lewis actually remained a rather reserved critic, who stopped short of branding Hatch a fraud, choosing instead to let his judgments speak for themselves. In later decades, skeptical spectators tended to be much more proactive than Lewis, opting for full contact activism. Taking the means of testing into their own hands, they did as two ordinary men from. Cleveland, Ohio, did in 1875, and insisted on "hav[ing] things done to suit themselves." The Clevelanders' plan was to create strict testable conditions by tying the medium down, but upon ascending the stage with ropes, the two men-J. B. Downing and F. C. Heritage-were confronted by the medium "who flared up and told the audience that if there were any among them who believed he was a humbug they could have their money back and leave the hall." He could never have imagined that the entire audience would take him up on his offer! Demanding their hard-earned cash back, they "left fully convinced that [the medium] was a genuine humbug." 68

How the reserved suspicion of someone like Alonzo Lewis blossomed into the more full-blown skeptical activism of the Cleveland audience in response to the new phenomenon of spirit materialization will be taken up in part 5. But first we must stop and consider the dramatic shift from aural to visual phenomenon in the nation's spiritualist performances, for we cannot rightly assess the place of skepticism and fraud in the world of public spiritualist performance without taking into -account the rise and meaning of spirit materialization phenomena.

 

Spiritualism P.1

Spiritualism P.2

Spiritualism P.3

Spiritualism P.4

Spiritualism P.6

Bibliography and Works Cited

1 Boston Daily Courier, 21 November 1857. Hereafter the Boston Daily Courier will be referred to as BDC. On James Buffum and John Alley, see David N. Johnson, Sketches of Lynn, or the Changes of Fifty Years (Lynn, Massachusetts: Thomas P. Nichols, 1880),439-450,468-471; and Clarence W. Hobbs, Lynn and Surroundings (Lynn, Massachusetts: Lewis and Winship, 1886), 139, 141. On Daniel Baker, see Alonzo Lewis and James R. Newhall, History of Lynn, Essex County, Massachusetts: Including Lynnfleld, Saugus, Swampscot, and Nahant (Lynn: Printed for James R. Newhall, 1865),566-567.

2 Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989),86.

3 BDC, 21 November 1857.

4 Banner of Light (Boston), 14 May 1857. Hereafter the Banner of Light will be referred to as BL.

7 Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American Theater: Actresses and Audiences, 1790-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 2 and 104-106; Bruce A. McConachie, "Pacifying American Theatrical Audiences, 1820-1900" in Richard Butsch, ed., For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption (philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990),59; and Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 95-96.

8 Butsch, American Audiences, 76-80

9 James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), 29 and 74-76.

10 BL, 19 December 1857,20 November 1869, and 27 March 1857;

11 Western Star (Boston), December 1872.

12 BL; 10 March 1860,9 January 1864, and 25 April 1863.

13 Ibid., 16 April 1857, 30 July 1857, 17 April 1858, and 10 March 1860. See also Frank Leslie's lllustrated Newspaper (New York), 9 May 1857.

14 BL, 27 March 1858; Leonard Twynham, ed., "Selections from Achsa W. Sprague's Diary and Journal," Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society 9 (1941): 163; and Emma Hardinge Britten and Margaret Wilkinson, Autobiography of Emma Hardinge Britten (Manchester and London: J. Heywood, 1900),77. BOC, 21 November 1857.

15 Territorial Enterprise (Virginia City, Nevada), January 1866 and February 1866.

16 Robert Damton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968); Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); and Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998).

17 Territorial Enterprise, February 1866; BL, 7 November 1857, 17 Apri11858, 25 December 1858, and 22 January 1859; American Spiritualist (Cleveland), 24 December 1870. See also BL, 27 March 1858.

18 Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005), 309-310; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 446-449; and Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2005), 386-401.

19 Ruth Bordin, Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, ed. The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1994); James Brewer Stewart. Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Society (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996); and Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)

20 Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),83-87,102-103; and Amar,Constitution, 419-428.
                                                                       .
21 Kenneth Cmie], Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (Berke]ey: University of Cali fomi a Press, ]990),23; Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000); chaps. ] and 2; and Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chape] Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 200]),5-6.

22 New Northwest (portland, Oregon), 12 September 1873. See also 2 and 3 July 1874.

23 Schmidt, Hearing Things, 240; BL, 23 May 1868; Uriah Clark, Plain Guide to Spiritualism: A Hand-Bookfor Skeptics. Inquirers, Clergymen, Believers, Lecturers, Mediums, Editors, and A/I Who Need a Thorough Guide to the Phenomena, Science, Philosophy, Religion, and Reforms of Modern Spiritualism (Boston: William White and Company, 1863), 53.

24 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), 30, 56; Dudden, Women, 107; and Butsch, American Audiences, 78-79, 96-97.

25 The Night Side o/New York (New York: 1. C. Haney, 1866), 11, quoted in Butsch, American Audiences, 97.

26 Uriah and Eliza Clark published their registers annually from 1857 to 1860. See, for example, Uriah Clark and Eliza Clark, ed. Spiritualist Register (Auburn, New York: Uriah Clark), 1857. The Register was alternatively titled Spiritualist Register and Annual Spiritual Register oyer its four-year run.

27 Braude, Radical Spirits, 83; BL, 3 April 1858. For more on the Victorian idea of women's natural piety and representative texts uom the historiographical debate that has surrounded that idea, see Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1850," American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 1151-1174; Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), chap. 4; Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Familyin Oneida, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Nancy A. Hardesty, Women Called to Witness: Evangelical Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999); and Elizabeth Elkin Grammer, Some Wild Visions:
Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

28 Spirit Messenger (Springfield, Massachusetts), 10 August 1850 and 7 December 1850.

29 BL, 14 May 1857, 53.

30 Fanny Ferret, "Mrs. Butler," Home Journal, 22 September 1849, 3. See also Dudden, Women.

31 Marlene Tromp advanced the idea that to understand the sexual undercurrents in spiritualist performance "we must turn to perhaps the most titillating of all the disruptions in modern Spiritualism, the receptive bodies" of young, female mediums. See Tromp,"Spirited Sexuality: Sex, Marriage, and Victorian Spiritualism," Victorian Literature and Culture. 31 (March 2003): 67-81.

32 Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991),96; New York Clipper, 22 September 1866; and M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 156-157. On vaudeville, see also Albert F. McLean, American Vaudeville as Ritual (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965).

33 Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 221-225; Dudden, Women, 116-118.

34 Dudden, Women, Ill, 157-164. On the place ofMencken and Thompson in American burlesque, see Allen, Horrible Prettiness.

35 Spirit of the Times (New York), 29 December 1860; New York Tribune, 27 November 1860; Clara Morris, Life on the Stage (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1901),22-23; and Dudden, Women, 142, 143. For more on Morris's later career, see Benjamin McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 1880-1920 (Iowa City: University ofIowa Press, 2000), 9, II.

36 J. F Parker to Achsa W. Sprague, 16 March 185~, Achsa W. Sprague Papers (hereafter referred to as A WS), Vermont Historical Society, Barre. See also Charles G. Townsend to Achsa W. Sprague, 6 January 1858, and Benjamin Gleason to Achsa W. Sprague, 12 September 1859; A WS

37 BL, 5 December 1857 and 24 October 1857; and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (New York), 9 May 1857.

38 Harrison D. Barrett, Life Work of Mrs. Cora L. V. Richmond (Chicago: Hack and Anderson, 1895), 183; and "The Confessions of a Medium," Atlantic Monthly, December 1860, 703.

39 Spiritualist Philosopher (Boston), 21 September 1850.

40 Cora L. V. Hatch, Discourses on Religion. Morals, Philosophy, and Metaphysics(New York: B.F. Hatch, 1858),3-4.
                          .
41 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (Autumn 1975): 12.

42 Tania Modelski, "Hitchcock, Feminism, and the Patriarchal Unconscious," in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990),66-67.

43 Welter, "True Womanhood," 1151-1174; Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, chaps. 2 and 4; D. C.

44 J. W. Daniels, Spiritualism Versus Christianity; or, Spiritualism Thoroughly Exposed (New York and Auburn: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1856),262-264.

45 B[enjamin] F[ranklin] Hatch, Spiritualists' Iniquities Unmasked, and the Hatch Divorce Case (New York: published by the author, 1859),6,12, 15-16.

46 Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), xiii xiv.

47 Wiebe, Search, 44-75; Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 116, 127; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 371; and Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978),86-108.

48 Bender, Community, 89-90, 105

49 The historiographical literature on nineteenth-century American mobility (both geographical and social) is so voluminous that only a selective sample of the best work on the subject can be provided here. Perhaps the seminal work on the movement from farm to factory and migrants' attempts to climb the social ladder was Thomas.Dublin's study of Lowell, Massachusetts: Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), esp. chap. 3. Other research quickly built upon Dublin's observations concerning the intertwined subjects of geographical migration and social mobility, including Jonathan Prude's The Coming of the Industrial Order: Town and Factory in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Bruce Laurie's Artisans Into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Noonday Press, 1989); and Charles Sellers's synthetic The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). New work is putting a new twist on the relationship between migration and social mobility by showing how downward mobility also influenced migration and transiency. See Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

50 Henry Ward Beecher, Seven Lectures to Young Men, on Various Important Subjects; Delivered Before the Young Men of Indianapolis, Indiana. During the Winter of 1843-4 (Indianapolis: Thomas B. Cutler, 1844), preface. On the cultural meaning and construction of the confidence man in the nineteenth century, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); and John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), chap. 3.

51 Halttunen, Confidence Men, chap. 2; and Kasson, Rudeness, chap. 3.

52 Halttunen, Confidence Men, chap. 4; and Kasson, Rudeness, chap. "hysterical.”,53

53 On women, cultural power, and the literary enterprise, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1988). On the feminization of hysteria, see Carroll Smith Rosenberg, "The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 197-216.

54 Trumpet and Universalist Magazine (Boston), 22 March 1851.

55 William A. Hammond, "The Physics and Physiology of Spiritualism" North American Review 110 (ApriI1870): 240.

56 Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976),341

57 Cook, Arts of Deception, 14.

58 P. T. Barnum, Humbugs of the World: An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quackeries, Deceits, and Deceivers Generally, In All Ages (New York: Carleton, 1866), 53; and Cook, Arts of Deception, 26 and 29.

59 Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 21; and Milwaukee Sentinel, 7 August 1841, quoted in Craig James Hazen, The Vii/age Enlightenment in America: Popular Religion and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 11. See also George H. Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), chaps. 3 and 4; and C. Leonard Allen, "Baconianism and the Bible in the Disciples of Christ: James S. Lamar and 'The Organon of Scripture,' " Church History 55 (March 1986): 65-67. For more on Baconian philosophy in its British context, see Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000). According to Bozeman, "Baconianism-resting on the assumption that all scientific method was a simple operation upon sense data-both presumed and reinforced the general assumption that the intelligibility sought by science did not exceed the reach of amateurs and laymen." See Bozeman, Protestants, xiii.

60 Barnum, Humbugs, 56.

61 La Roy Sunderland, The Trance and Correlative Phenomena (Chicago: Published by James Walker, 1868),72-75; and George Miller Beard, The Scientific Basis of Delusions: A New Theory of Trance, and Its Bearings on Human Testimony (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1877),5-7. For more onthe various secular interpretations of trance that surfaced in the nineteenth century, see Ann Taves, Fits, Trances. and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experiencefrom Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), chaps. 5 and 6. Beard was also known as the debunker of Mollie Fancher, the so-called "fasting girl" of Brooklyn. See Michelle Stacey, The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2002), chap.5.

62 Taves, Fits, 201; BL, 28 November 1857.

63 David N. Johnson, Sketches of Lynn. or the Changes of Fifty Years (Lynn, Massachusetts: Thomas P. Nichols, 1880), 439-445; and David Jaffee, "The Village Enlightenment in New England, 17601820," William and Mary Quarterly 47 (July 1990): 327.

64 Historians George Daniels and Craig Hazen affinn that practicality and utility were characteristics that the majority of lay Americans insisted were of great importance in the development of scientific and philosophical thought. See Daniels, American Science, 47-48; and Hazen, Vii/age Enlightenment, 12.

65 D. Hamilton Hurd, History of Essex County, Massachusetts (philadelphia: J. W. Lewis and Company, 1888),348-350; Johnson, Sketches, 445 and 449-450; Alan Dawley, Class and Community: the Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976),82; and Paul G. Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 17801860 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981),231; and Rapoza., "Touched," 58. The "Cordwainer's Song" is quoted in Faler, Mechanics, 231.

66 Johnson, Sketches, 439-450,468-471; Hobbs, Surroundings, 139, 141.

67 BDC, 21 November 1857; BL, 5 December 1857.

68 Cleveland Leader, 1 January 1875.

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