S2 – 10: Invisible Hands

New Orleans Tribune, had called a political convention. The Tribune had been founded by an Afro Creole doctor named Louis Charles Rudinat as rallying point for Louisiana radicals, and it commanded respect among the state's reformers. They met to confirm in eighteen sixty four state constitution that had stripped power the planter class and abolished slavery. The backlash, though, was vicious. White planters had the ear of General Banks, the Union

Army commander governing the state. They said Louisiana should have and I quote, a government of white people for the exclusive political benefits of the white race. Yeah, they weren't subtle about it at all. The planters were powerful, though. They convinced Banks to keep the plantation system, and he used the Union Army to force black Louisiana's to keep working the land of any planter who would declare loyalty to the United States. His soldiers marched the roads, capturing

anyone who left their work. Meanwhile, he let imprisoned Confederate soldiers walk. But the black folk on the sharp end of these policies didn't go quietly. The Tribune started by publishing articles showing how Banks was forcing workers to keep living in slavery. It was a voice that would echo back across the Atlantic, where Victor Hugo would return with the letter to the Tribune, encouraging the radicals to keep fighting for justice. Messages came from across the Last Horizon

as well. The spirit of John Brown appeared to Henri and the Sir Harmonique with a word of celebration. He praised the Tribune for its defense of black equality. So in eighteen sixty six, when the Tribune announced a convention to amend the earlier constitution and finally give black men the right to vote in Louisiana, people came in crowds,

and the meeting started on a hopeful note too. That first night, the city's police fought with a group of armed delegates who were defending the convention and killed two of them. Sadly, it was a dire omen of what would happen the next day. When black delegates to the convention arrived at the Mechanics Institute the next morning for the second day of the meeting, they were confronted by a crowd of white opponents that was swelling with anger.

Here's historian Emily Clark. The day begins with some fanfare. There's a little parade of black New Orleanans marching to the Mechanics Institute to celebrate this. This is gonna be a great day, but it's not. It ends up being an absolutely horrid, horrid day because a white mob, aided by local police and firefighters, storm the building and massacre many of the delegates inside. Most of the delegates were unarmed, but that white supremacist mob was heavily armed. Over forty

people died that day, almost all of them Black. Violence like this in eighteen sixty six ended up galvanizing a new brand of reconstruction politics. Nationally, which then worked harder to promote black civil rights. In the wake of the violence, someone had collected the tattered flag and tucked it away. When the community gathered to hold a memorial service for

the convention, they brought it out again. It was a stark reminder of the nation they were working to build, and of the courage and sacrifices some had made to bring that nation, that Louisiana, that New Orleans into being. It was exactly a year later that Cora stepped into the Mechanic Institute to honor those who were killed that day. Afterwards, the Tribune published her poems call for solemn mournful bells

to ring out over the city. Nathan must have been proud, but when he wrote to the Rochester Express to give them news on the progress of reconstruction, he wasn't praising Corps powers of oratory. Instead, he was reporting on a new scourge in the city. People were fleeing New Orleans in the face of two deadly diseases, cholera and yellow fever. Nathan, so often traveling those streets as he rallied for change, came home one night in late September feeling dizzy and

shivering with fever. By October one, it had burned through his body. Henrietta, less than a year old, wasn't strong enough to fight off the infection. By October they were both dead. Grieving her losses, Cora retreated back to the Northeast. The future that she had envisioned with her radical husband had been taken away. If Cora was going to find peace, as so many others like her had wanted, it would have to come from the most unusual of places, the

spirits of the dead. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron manky M. Benjamin Butler led the charge During the war. He was the general in command of the Union forces that sees New Orleans. When he returned to Massachusetts, he was elected to the United States Congress. During the time that Nathan Daniels was in Washington, he had connected with Butler, who had once been his superior officer. In Washington. The two men lobbied together for reconstruction, but they were opposed by

Andrew Johnson. Like General Banks, Johnson's opinions were swayed by the powerful interests of Southern planters, who still wielded enough influence to reach into the White House. It was the compromises that President Johnson made and his v toe of bills supporting the newly freed Black Americans that put him in General Butler's crosshairs. After all, Butler had never been shy about fighting southern white leaders he considered traitors to

the nation. They considered him evil. They called him beast Butler. When President Johnson was impeached, Beast Butler was the ringmaster who choreographed the events. In the years before she went to New Orleans, Cora had been the spirit adviser to radical congressmen. Just like Butler, they pushed for reconstruction policies that put the government of the South in the hands

of northern reformers. Lincoln's spirit had spoken through Cora frequently and guided their approach to policy, alongside dead Boston abolitionist ministers and the spirit of William Wilberforce. Now that she had returned to the capital, with grief stripping her of any shyness she might have had, she took bolder steps than she ever had before. In September of eighteen sixty eight, she joined a ritualist newspaper editor in confronting President Andrew

Johnson directly barging right into his White House office. As soon as the door closed behind them, Cora opened her mouth and laughed. But the voice wasn't her own. As the papers reported it, Johnson was and I quote dumb with astonishment because the laugh was Abraham Lincoln's. The voice that followed said, let him laugh, who wins. No one in the room, not Cora, not the reporter, not President

Johnson explained what the phrase meant. But it was just months after Andrew Johnson had been impeached by the House and the country was facing the new election that would put Grants in office. Cora's spirit address to Johnson was cryptic, but there was no doubt that she wanted to confront the president with the knowledge that the Spirits had not given up on the nation, and anyone who opposed their

vision for reform was destined to fail. In May of a t sixty nine, Cora was still thinking hard about that nation, and she was seeing it with more and more distress. After mourning the violence of white supremacy in New Orleans, she came back to Washington with new words of rebuke. She spoke in a meeting of the Universal Peace Society, and she wasn't gentle a government that has,

for nearly a century enslaved the African race. She said, that proscribes the Chinese race, proposes to exterminate the Indian race, and persistently refuses to recognize the rights of one half of its citizens. Women cannot justly be called perfect. If Cora was thinking more expansively than ever before about how the US government treated and control that's people, we can see why she had just married for a third time.

Her new husband, Samuel Tapin, was a spiritualist, a journalist, and a soldier who had been deeply involved in uncovering the truth of a brutal mass murder of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people in Colorado known as the Sand Creek Massacre. Samuel had investigated the killing for the federal government. He determined that the commanding officer of the Third Colorado Volunteer, a Methodist minister nicknamed the Fighting Parson, had deliberately carried

out the slaughter in cold blood. As far as Nathan could tell, this was a minister who had hoped that by killing enough of his indigenous neighbors, he could raise his public profile high enough to make a run at political office. Nathan's reports went back to the federal government,

and they went to the spiritualist press as well. His opinions resonated with Corus Christians, he wrote, professing to be followers of the Prince of Peace, had instead attacked Native nations with sword and cannon, creeds and whiskey, bibles and booie knives. And he wasn't just talking about one incident either.

In Samuel's eyes, if it wasn't the steel of sabers and rifles threatened the indigenous nations, it was the steel of the railroads cutting through the land monopoly, he wrote, is fast turning this western garden of the world into a moral wilderness. Over the next few years, his opinion would be published frequently by the Banner of Light. His stature rose within the government at the same time. Ever since his work investigating and testifying about the Sand Creek Massacre,

Samuel had served on the Indian Peace Commission. In that role, he helped to negotiate treaties with the Plains nations. After that he joined a separate commission, one task with making sure the United States government followed those treaties. He had little success, though, which only made him more angry. When Samuel Tapin married Cora, she was reporting messages from Native

spirit guides like Weena. Together, the couple joined their voices to shape spiritualist opinions about the ongoing seizure of native land across the West. In fact, some seance circles even reported messages from Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders who had died at Sand Creek. Here's historian and browdie. Spiritualists are always reformers, and they are very active in Indian rights reform movements. They are extremely critical of massacres of Indians. They protest

against them. Samuel Tappan in particular, who is an Indian rights reformer. With leading spiritualist speakers like Cora regularly giving addresses on Indian rights, and government officials like Samuel Tapin publishing in the spiritualist newspapers, spiritualists continue to find themselves criticizing violence that was widely accepted in white communities across

the nation. Spiritualists are in an odd position in my view, where they are espousing Indian rights, but they are all so perpetrating stereotypes that place Indians in the past, in a romantic past where Indians are appropriately living in the spirit world and providing support for spirit mediums, rather than

exercising sovereignty in the present. But if the early seances portrayed Native spirits as guides and healers for white spiritualists, the tone changed as reports of more violence reached seance circles in the East. When murdered leaders arrived to speak at seance tables. During the reports of genocide and dispossession of the eighteen sixties and seventies, Indian blessings on spiritualists were replaced by Indian curses, curses on a nation whose

soldiers and citizens had murdered them. But as other newspapers fell in line with the white supremacist rhetoric of writers who pushed the idea of manifest destin the banner of light, continued to print criticisms of that message. It was their responsibility to heed the voices of the spirits, after all, and report their messages to the reading public. Something was happening.

Spiritualists who had viewed slavery as a sin that left a stain on the nation had begun to see America's westward advancement into the territory of the Native Americans as just more of the same. Their editorials called u S policy a fraud and a swindle at a time when few other voices would as violence piled on violence. Cora and the radical politicians who heeded her spirits were sure that this was just one more way that the nation

needed to be knocked down and made new again. But to take those stains away, they needed more than hope. The letters burned so bright that they lit up the whole room. They were right there, scrawled into the very surface of the table. Too many spirits had spoken through so many tables over the years to even count, but this marble surface looked like it was inscribed with fire.

The word was a single Greek name, Demosthenes. It glowed as a calling card for the stately figure dressed in a tunic, solemn and graceful, who stood before Victoria wood Hall. She recognized him, of course. It was one of the spirits who had appeared to her from time to time over the years, and he'd always told her that she would rise to great distinction in a city of ships. At last, he had arrived to reveal his identity to her, because the time had come for her to lead her

people just as he had the ancient Athenians. Journey to New York. The spirit told her there was a house waiting for her there, along with the future he'd always promised. At least that's how Victoria told the story that Marble Table had been in a Pittsburgh apartment where Victoria had been staying after years of traveling with James Blood. She had even been to disease stricken New Orleans, arriving just

as Cora left and shortly before Christmas. In eighteen sixty six, Victoria and James had published an advertisement for their powers of healing to the city's alien residents. They had been to Memphis, Tennessee, which had also been plagued by white supremacist violence that year. Then they returned to St. Louis before moving on to Chicago, where the courts were more willing to hand out divorce papers than anywhere else in the Midwest. But now in eighteen sixty eight, those trips

were coming to an end. It was time for Victoria and James to build something. They weighed their options. Following the Spirit of Demosthenes to New York was one, but there was another leading light that they considered. Victoria reached out to some friends in high places. She traveled to Galena, Illinois and visited one of the officers who had come man died James Blood's troops during the war. Since then, Victoria and James had spent time with that officer's father

in Cincinnati and become friends with his family. And Victoria thought it would be nice if he took on James Blood as his personal secretary. Because you see, that man was Ulysses S. Grant, and he had just won the presidential election. He was headed to Washington. We can't blame him if he didn't want to bring Blood with him

to the White House. Though you see, his escapades with Victoria had already hit the papers where they were saying that the gallant colonel had abandoned his family and thrown away his money to travel the world with and I quote the Witch of Washington Avenue. When Grant decided against taking James Blood with him, it settled the matter. James and Victoria set out for New York instead, But the choices that Grant would make while in office would still

prove crucial to lifting Victoria's fortunes. First, though, there were connections to be made in Manhattan. Here's author Mary Gabriel. When they arrived in New York, you know, they had no connections there, and it was, as you say, the entire Clafland clan followed. And so Victoria and Tenny got to work doing what they did best, their only sure way of making money, which was working as spiritualists. And Tenney was an expert of laying out of hands, and

Victoria was the spiritualist advisor. And Buck Claflin did what he did, which would go out and try to recruit clients. New York had plenty of possible subjects. Spiritualism was strong in the city after all. But it wasn't just spiritualism that interested Victoria. She didn't want to spend her days entertaining a line of tourists. She wanted to finally put her political vision into practice. For that she needed a patron,

a dedicated supporter with money. And there was one person whose name was floating around the city with the echoes of cash following after it, Cornelius Vanderbilt. His is a name that many of us have heard before. His shipping empire had brought him mounts of cash, but in the years before Victoria arrived, he had felt the sting of personal losses. His wife Sophia had recently died, and he had lost a fortune in a battle with a fellow

Wall Street speculator over control of Western railroads. All of this was well known, but Victoria's father, Buck Claflin, and the rest of the clan that was settling in New York learned something else. Through their spiritualist network. Cornelius Vanderbilt was willing to hear from the spirits. Spiritualism may have come into Vanderbilt's life through his daughter, who had been a believer for years. By eighteen sixty four, Cornelius was trying to contact the spirit of his dead father through

New York City mediums. By eighteen sixty eight, he was feeling old himself and had already been turning to magnetizers and spiritualist healers for relief from his aches and pains. So when Victoria and her sister Tenny arrived in New York, the wealthy industrialist found comforts in a young woman who mode of healing was the laying on of hands. Soon the sisters were spending a lot of time with Cornelius.

He often invited Tenney to his office and called her his little sparrow, while she joked with them, read to him, and laid on hands in Victoria, he got a personal medium, and as their conversations multiplied, he found in her an unusual and inspiring energy and intelligence. He also started to hear investment advice from the spirits, and he would give it in turn, along with hefty fees for their services.

Here's more from Mary Gabriel. And so they became confidence of Cornelia's Vanderbilt, one of the most important and wealthiest man in America. And you know, it's one of these incredible American stories that you know, they went literally overnight from being no one in New York to being within the circle where all the powerful decisions are made. Demosthenes hadn't steered her wrong, and neither had Cornelius. James Blood took the money Victoria made from Vanderbilt and invested it

according to his advice. And as those investments blossomed, James and Victoria put their heads together to decide how they could put this growing fortune to use. The spirits, it seems, weren't just ghostly visitors from another world. They also knew just what made this world go round. Trouble was brewing. In eighteen sixty eight, The Banner of Light published a report from the third Annual Convention of the Illinois State

Spiritual Association with a foreboding warning. They said that there was and I quote lack of harmony among spiritualists for a movement built on the foundation of Andrew Jackson Davis's harmonial philosophy, this was a dangerous thing to hear. Every seance required harmony among the participants in order for the spirits to be heard, and if they hope to keep growing into an enduring cultural force, they would need that harmony.

The Reformers might have seemed to win the day and motivate the victorious army through four long years of war. They might even have been able to claim legions of new converts as the widows and mourning mothers found their way to the seance table, but their new world had not yet clicked into place. In fact, cities all across the country were still filled with conflict, and that included

the capital. But with President Grant in office, there were some among the reformers who saw a clearer path into the future. In eighteen sixty nine, sojourn nerd Truth was headed back to Washington, d C. To be present for the ratification of the fifteenth Amendment, finally ensuring that black men had the right to vote to cross the entire nation. On the way there, she stopped in New York City, where she stayed with friends, including a visit to Leah

Underhill's Street, Brownstone. Although she had retreated from the public stage, Leah had lost no stature among spiritualists and would still give private sittings to friendly visitors, especially when that visitor was so journal truth. She also stayed with Theodore Tilton, the editor of a powerful liberal religious newspaper. Tilton was well known for printing the power of God and the rhetoric of reform. He was a natural friend to Sojourner, but he and his wife Elizabeth were going to become

very familiar with Victoria Woodhall in the coming years. Also while in the city, Sojourner spoke at one of the most popular pulpits in the nation, Plymouth Church, where the preacher Henry Ward Beecher held court. But Sojourner wasn't the only one on the road to Washington that year. In January, the city played host to the first national female Suffrage Convention. With money in her pockets and a determination to join the cause, Victoria Woodhall was one of the many to arrive.

There was hope in the air with the War one and Grant elected. Surely it was time for every reformer who had served in the cause of abolition to now turn their interests towards the cause of women. Organizers who expected it to be that easy, though, we're deeply disappointed.

Some leaders, like Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susan B. Anthony wanted to push for a sixteenth Amendment that would give women the right to vote, but others thought a more gradual approach that pushed for suffrage state by state was the only way to achieve that goal, and this difference in approach led to some ferocious arguments. It seems that advocates for women's rights were no more united than the spiritualists were, and no surprise, they were often one and

the same. Victoria made her way back to New York thoroughly unimpressed. To her the battles between the reformers were what she called teacup hurricanes. Women needed to gain real ground and fast, so she decided that at the first opportunity she would lead by example, an opportunity that swiftly came thanks to Cornelius Vanderbilt and Ulysses S. Grant. Here's

more from Mary Gabriel. Two of the big traders on Wall Street, Jim Fiskin and Jay Gould, knew that every week Grant sold a lot of gold on the market to try to keep kind of keep the coffers, the United States Conference government coffers full, and it was a weekly sort of release of precious metals to enrich the government. Through an acquaintance, they decided to try to convince Grant not to sell, and so that would drive up the price of gold and it would become even more precious,

and it normally was well. That happened, but then Grant learned of the scheme, and so in a counter move, he opened the flood again and the gold started pouring out onto the market. Vanderbilt had been privy to all of this, and so he told Tenney and Victoria that this was going to happen. And so on the day this Black Friday in occurred, Victoria was there eyeing up gold. It was dropping in price, dropping like a stone, and

in that day she amassed a sizeable fortune. By the end of the day, Victoria and Tenny had made a stunning seven hundred thousand dollars in profit. Their names were splashed across the pages Queens of Finance, Vanderbilt's protegees. With their new fortune as ballast, Victoria and Tenny threw open the doors of Woodhull, Claflin and Co. The first woman owned brokerage in the city. Victoria would later write, we had been instructed by the spirits in the administration of

public affairs. Now it was time to apply that knowledge, though, and when it came to striking a claim for the place of women in society, she said, there could have been nothing else in legitimate business that would attract the comments of the press more than the establishment of a banking house by two women. Victoria Woodhull had begun the year as the Witch of Washington Avenue, and now she was something more. She was the Witch of Wall Street.

Gold was good, but Victoria's vision for the future wasn't the only way. The spirits were putting flesh on the bones of the movement. In eighteen seventy, Emma Harding would put spiritualism on paper with a landmark history She called modern American spiritualism a twenty years record of a communion between Earth and the world of the spirits. It was a sweeping history that collected stories from across spiritualist networks.

Newspapers telling local stories had hit the public from the moment's first days, but this was a project with much larger ambitions. Here's historian Kathy Gutierrez. Emma started off with doing trance lectors, and she was very erudite and very articulate it, and she over time became what I consider to be probably still the most important historian of spiritualism.

And she wrote this massive compendium using primary sources, which how she collected all of that in the nineteenth century, I have no idea, and put it together in what sort of created a coherent narrative of spiritualism. She laid out a picture of the movement from its first steps to its full strength. It was a play for legitimacy, but it was also a play for authority. If Emma's book was a landmark in driving home the history of spiritualism for scholars, the year it was published was also

a landmark in Emma's life. She married a man whose name might sound familiar from the years before the Civil War, William Britain. He was the spiritualist whose kindness had made him stand out from the crowd when he helped Cora to escape the clutches of Benjamin Hatch. And it was as Emma Harding Britain that the English pianist turned trance medium turned religious historian would go down in the record books. But she wasn't the only one making a bid to

put themselves in the author's chair. When it came to the story of spiritualism in the books of one Boston writer who wanted palpable proof of immortality, the question of testing the spirits took on more weight, sometimes quite literally. In fact, when it came to the evolution of spiritualism, the eighteen seventies were the decade of materialization. More and more seances weren't just filled with tapping sounds, turning tables,

and flickering lights. Instead, mediums were bringing something more into being. Physical objects called up ports were arriving in the room. And then the ghostly hands that had so often been invisible to previous sitters began to take on material form. But if a hand, why not more. Here's Emily Clark

once again. You'd find these descriptions from people who are out of materialization seance and they might notice by their feet what looks like a small white handkerchief has appeared, and very slowly the handkerchief grows and it turns into something bigger and bigger and bigger. In the next thing, you know, the spirit of your deceased wife has materialized right next to you, and then she hugs you, or she kisses you, she grabs you. You can feel her

material body. It was spiritualism's second wave, and it upended what people expected to see when they went to a seance. Here's historian John Busher. I think about that as part of this notion that the process that was going on in this new era was the elevation of Earth to heaven and the drawing down of Heaven to earth. Tapping sounds could be misinterpreted, trans lectures could be explained away.

But when a medium con you're a gauzy object into the room that could be seen, that could be felt, Well, what could explain away something so tangible. In eighteen seventy two, the reformer Robert Dale Owen published a book on spiritualism that hit the shelves, just as new waves of materialization seance, as we're putting the movement back into the headlines. It was published by a big non spiritualist publishing house, too,

and it was a smash hit. That's because Robert wasn't just some unknown He was the son of the Scottish reformer whose utopian towns had inspired so many spiritualist communities in the eighteen forties, and he had spent the eighteen sixties in Washington, d C. Where he had served on the Commission for Establishing Government aid to the newly free Black Americans. Working alongside Nathan Daniels, he helped lay the foundation for the Freedman's Bureau that would oversee efforts like

sojourn or Truth's work on the Freedman's Hospital. In his new book, though, he was stepping deeper into the world of spiritualism by publishing fascinating stories about his experiences with a medium who had been off limits to the public for years. In fact, he had participated in private, dramatic sittings with her right inside her fancy New York home, and the medium's name the Oldest Fox Sister, Leah Underhill.

They answered the questions on his mind. In the very first seance, Robert remembered seeing lights that floated around the room. As they did, though they also slowly grew larger, and at the same time they took on the distinct shape of hands. One of those hand shaped lights, he later explained, grew as large as a human head before it lowered itself to the floor and began to pound out those

infamous knocking sounds that had become so commonplace in the movement. Finally, that which had been invisible had now been revealed to his eyes. At a smaller, more intimate seance the following summer, Robert had an even closer encounter. They had retreated to Leah's bedroom for the seance, Robert, Leah, her husband Daniel,

and one other close friend. Everyone took a seat around a small, intimate, rectangular table, and the knocking started almost immediately, so they turned on the lights and started to sing again. A light appeared. Robert said it took the form of a small hand, but covered with a shimmering veil. He watched it approach him and then felt a light touch like fingers on his shoulder. When he asked the spirit

to move to the door and knock on it. The light wandered off, knocked, and caused, in response, a lapdog outside in the hall to start barking at the sound. The light returned and brushed Owen's hand and then caressed his head. He later wrote that it felt as if a soft and fine piece of gauze were pressed gently against the back of my head and neck. Not once, however, did Robert detect the footfalls or rustle of clothing that might have been caused by a body moving around the room.

No one in the small group before ever moved or let go of each other's hand around the table, and Robert was convinced the spirits were bringing Heaven to Earth, one material body at a time. They were literally reaching out to be touched. Publishing this story made Robert Dale Owen the darling of the spiritualist world, so much so,

in fact, that he decided to lean in. He wanted evidence of eternal life that was irrefutable, so when he heard that a spirit whose whole body had materialized in a Philadelphia seance had asked for him by name, well, he couldn't refuse. The seances were enchanting. He sat with two mediums, a husband and wife for a series of meetings with the spirit. As they lowered the lights and went into their trance, the promised specter would appear. She seemed to grow out of nothing like the spectral hands.

She would start out as a faint light loading through space until it took form and strode into his presence. The spirit called herself Katie King and gave Robert everything he was hoping for. She audibly spoke with him, calling him father Owen, and then kissed him. Over the course of their meetings, they even traded gifts. He would eventually possess a lock of her hair he cut from her head, pieces of fabric cut from her dress and veil, a bouquet of flowers, and a small tortoise shell box. Owen

rushed to write a report to the encounters. The medium's never moved. He said there was no chance that one of them was impersonating the spirit of Katie King. While she was manifest in the room. He had explored its corners and the spirit cabinet from which she had emerged,

and determined that everything was as it seemed. With his book flying into hands around the country, the Atlantic Magazine agreed to publish his account he sent it to the editors under the title Touching Spiritual Visitants from a Higher Life. But that's when things went south. Before his article could be published, Robert had a shocking revelation. A young woman went public with the confession that she was the person who had been Katie King in that darkened room. He

had given her gifts during the seance. Eventually, Owen met with her in the light of day, and she gave those gifts back. She was, in fact an actor who conspired with the mediums to trick their visitors. Robert even had some help digging up the evidence of the fraud. His agent and pulling together the facts of the case was none other than Henry Steele Alcott, the man who

had helped solve Lincoln's murder. Alcott questioned how reliable the woman actually was because plenty about her story didn't add up. Even so, her confession was devastating. Robert's article was eventually published. Alongside it was a note that made it clear that it was all humbug, and it turned Owen and spiritualism by association into a laughing stock. Too many spiritualists, though the events only served as evidence that materializations were fraudulent.

They remained convinced that it was the result of predators taking on what was good and true about spiritualism and exploiting it for their personal gain. Things didn't end well for Robert dale Owen I'm afraid. In the aftermath of the ordeal, his own family demanded that he turned away from the beliefs that had led to such a public humiliation, but he refused, leaving them with the difficult choice of having him declared insane. When his children were through with him,

his life was effectively over. They had him placed against his will in an asylum. Her gallery opened in the heart of London. That might not sound unusual at first, After all, it was full of bright pieces of artwork, watercolors, acrylics, pencils, all of which are familiar mediums, but there was another layer to the display. All one hundred and fifty five works were created by the woman who had opened the gallery,

a middle aged spinster named Georgiana Houghton. In the previous decades of spiritualism in London, most spirit communication was the kind we know. There was plenty of table tapping, table tilting, trans lectures and spirit writing, but every one of these modes had become old hat now, though, mediums and their followers were looking for new manifestations of spirit power, and Georgiana gave it to them. Her wild swirls of color, she said, were the physical representations of spirits through her,

the invisible world took on vibrant form. Georgiana didn't start out as a public medium, though, when the British press was still calling out mediums as frauds for the simplest table wrappings, she had gone with her cousin to a seance so that she could judge for herself if any of it was true. At the first seance, one spirit singled her out, claiming to be her dead sister Zillah. The things it said apparently shot Georgiana into belief. Soon after,

she started to read spiritualist books. She talked with her mother about the possibility of eternal life and spirit communication, and then together they started their own seances at home. One historian called Georgiana sincere and reverent. She seems to have held her seances in an attitude of quiet prayer, like the Sir Harmonique in New Orleans. Her seances were private, devotional,

and deeply felt. This was far from the stagey showmanship of town hall demonstrations or the red carpet rolled out at the entrance of a Claflind hospital house. After one seance held at Pentecost, Georgiana wrote that the experience of spirit contact was simply a new outpouring of God's spirit, rather than being a means of raking in cash. Her spiritualist practice almost became her ruin, as the spirits became her muse. Rather than just received messages through taps on

the table. She began to paint, and soon the spectral hands of masters, lectician and Correggio were guiding her. Once she even claimed to fall under the control of Joseph, the husband of the Virgin Mary. With him, she said, the colors were laid on with much more strength. When others started to see her art, she got some of the same unwanted attention that hit Robert dale Owen. There were whispers that she was mentally disturbed. The weird shapes

that filled her paintings were unsettling to some. They wanted to get her medical attention. Fortunately for Georgiana, she avoided one's fate. That eight seventy one exhibition in London was put on at Georgiana's own expense. Her ambition was to make spirit drawings more popular, to spread her work as an example for others to follow. By that measure, it was a complete failure, but there were a few newspaper reviews that urged people to go and see her work

and to be astonished. But there was also plenty of contempt too, and even horror at the hallucinations that she produced. And while many visited, almost none came to buy. Before it was over, she was nearly bankrupt, and seeing the lengths that she went to to advertise the exhibition to Victorian high society, it's no wonder she created an elaborate catalog and distributed it to notable names. What's more, she even created a special edition for Queen Victoria, made of

pink satin, white calf skin and gold. She distributed all kinds of advertisements and hired an army to help her with the exhibition. Heavy was the loss, she later wrote, but never for one moment have I experienced a shadow of regret for having undertaken it. I threw myself and my substance, heart and soul into God's treasury, and not

one fraction what I wished to withdraw. There was one bright spot, though, all that advertising spread that even reached America, and it caught the attention of a few dignitaries from the spiritualist realm, perhaps none more significant than the woman who had helped give birth to the very movement. Georgiana's painting celebrated Leah Fox Underhill. Leah arrived in London just before the exhibition began. In fact, it was her very

first stop in the city. As she and her husband, Daniel, strode into the gallery, Daniel found Georgiana and told her, motioning towards his wife, there goes the first medium in the world. Georgiana later wrote that the two women spoke, although she didn't record what it is they discussed. As other amy it can streamed in. They told her that news of her new manifestations had been printed as far

away as California. The exhibition might have been a financial failure, but it brought a wave of spiritualist seekers to England from the troubled United States, and it was just one of the many attractions that would make the trip across the Atlantic so popular in the coming years. After all, if spiritualism truly was for everyone, and there was no chance it was going to stay put. That's it for

this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for next week. Next time on Unobscured Once, the spirit of a woman arrived at a seance and simply said that she was one who suffered the explanation of that suffering could have been printed by Victoria Woodhull. This nameless woman was born to a wealthy family, she told the circle, but she married a predator. He scooped up her inheritance

and then abandoned her. In the years that followed, she had supported herself through sex work, but found no one to help her until she crossed into death. Now, she said she was comforted by Mary Magdalen the New Orleans at the seance table of men. Her radical message came across clearly. A society that would judge and punish women

for surviving abuse was unjust. A society in harmony, however, would look like something new, Not a hierarchy, but a circle where the poor were lifted up and men and women joined hands to seek out the wisdom of the past and map out the future. And it was a future Henri and the others we're still willing to fight for. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership with

I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links to our other shows over at history unobscured dot com, and until next time, thanks for listening. Unobscured is a

production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Monkey. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit i heeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.