Spirit Politics: Antebellum Reform and the Shape of American Spiritualism

In 1852 Isaac Post published Voices from the Spirit World, a collection of communications from he'd received from his "spirit friends," the departed souls of notable politicians, religious thinkers, and writers such as Thomas Jefferson, George Fox, and Margaret Fuller. Post was a writing medium. He would forfeit control of his arm to the deceased who would communicate their wisdom and insights from the spirit world through Post's hand.

Post was neither a fraud nor a crank. When he published Voices he was a 54-year-old man who had a long and distinguished history as an earnest and active abolitionist and a leader among more progressive Quakers. How could he believe that the words he wrote came from luminaries like George Washington and Voltaire? This paper provides an answer to that question by reexamining the relationship between certain facets of radical antebellum reform ideology and Spiritualism. For decades a variety of reformers had believed that spirit or soul could serve as a mechanism for leveling the power hierarchies--slavery, patriarchy, international war--of mid-nineteenth-century America. Believing these hierarchies to be rooted in physical, bodily differences, they aimed to connect soul to soul by forging spiritualized friendships that transcended the bodily divisions of race and sex and nation. Spiritualism drew upon and literalized these ideas about disembodiment and spiritualized friendship. Spiritualism thus represented the apotheosis of this facet of antebellum reform ideology. Spiritualism also, this paper argues, accelerated demise of this ideology as more reformers grew critical of Spiritualism and promises of social change based on disembodied spirituality, increasingly seeing both as distractions from the practical work of freeing those millions held in bondage in the South.