S2 – 4: The Way, The Truth, The Lie

of its evil for the rest of her life. Maybe somewhere along the way, Belle had heard that Isaac condemned the evil that his neighbors considered normal. Maybe it was just their mutual friends who told Bell that Isaac would lend her a hand, whatever the case. On July, Bell knocked on Isaac's door. When he welcomed her inside. Bell stepped in, holding her infant daughter, and then quickly explained what had happened. By that time, though the man she

had escaped was hard on her heels. Soon enough, a second fist was pounding on Isaac's door, his voice demanding that Bell come back to his home, to his land. The slavery, never wanted to shrink from danger or oppression. Bell answered back, yes, she was here, but no, she would never go back to her old life. Furious, the pair continued to spar until Isaac stepped in and paid the man off. He marched back out to the road, fuming with anger and frustration, his money clenched in a

tight fist. Isaac turned to Bell and said, there is but one master, and he who is your master is my master. The pair stood together as they always had, nothing more than children of God, following his voice, agonizing days were ahead, though Bell stayed as a guest with

Isaac's family while she decided what to do next. But the rest of her children were still held captive, and Isaac heard news one day the Bell's five year old son, Peter, a spirited, mischievous, inquisitive boy, had disappeared from the farm. Asking more questions, they learned that the man's nephew had taken the boy to New York City and sold him to Alabama. The malice behind the sale was clear. Bell charged back to the farm and confronted the family. The

farmer's wife mocked her and spat venomous slurs. Both at her and her boy. But whenever she recalled that moment years later, Bell would say, I was sure God would help me to get him. I felt as if the power of the nation was with me. But she knew the nation she imagined, the one that honored her dignity and worth, was still struggling to be born. For now. The United States was still gripped by what she called a national sin that made America Babylon instead of New Israel.

Here's historian Margaret Washington. This is our second sense of what a powerhouse this woman is going to be. The first one is when she challenges her owner and flees. The second one is when she will not accept the fact that her son has been sold. And she basically campaigned all over the neighborhood of Ulster County, rilling people about this, and especially the Quakers, because it is against the law. But what enslaved woman has the wherewithal to

challenge the slave power? Antislavery? Quakers rallied to her cause and helped to pay for a lawyer, But when they reached the courtroom, things were already tilted against Bell. The district attorney on the case was another nephew of the farmer that Bell had escaped. The jury was a collection of other wealthy slaveholders and their relatives, and at one point the Justice of the Peace even suggested pain Bell six hundred dollars to settle trial. But this was her

son's life on the line. Belle raised Hell, and she had allies on her side, Quakers, yes, but also the spirits of her dead father and the spirit of God himself. She talked with God as she traveled the countryside organizing support. By the day of the trial, well healed country squires were squaring off on both sides of the case. It took a year, but in the end, Bell and her son Peter won their reunion under the laws of New York, much to the anger of some of the states citizens.

Bell would later talk about these divisions in New York as a spiritual contest like the one between Babylon and Israel, a contest for the soul of the nation. But for too many women like Bell, that fight was not just

a metaphor. Her story makes clear what was at stake in the battles she would fight for the rest of her life, whether the next generation of black Americans would continue to be shuffled from bondage to bondage for the profit of powerful slaveholders, or whether black families would be able to break the system of chattel slavery rebel The fight was as personal as it gets, but Bell didn't

struggle alone. Together with her friends and the anti slavery societies of the Northeast, including those in Rochester, she became part of something bigger, a movement, a driving force of radicalism and revolution, a force that was all too familiar to someone else, the spiritualists. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. The call to freedom was spiritual. You'll remember that when Bell freed herself, she was following the voice of God, and when she took up the fight for her son's freedom,

she viewed it as a divine mission. In fact, most radical reformers in the eighteen hundreds were intensely religious. One abolitionist would later say that she left her church more because it was comfortable with slavery than because she stopped believing any of its teachings. Even Amy and Isaac Post criticized their fellow Quakers not because they rejected the religion, but because they saw how corrupt some Quakers had become. When Bell started living with a family known as the

Van Wagoners. She joined them from Methodist camp meetings in rural New York. She found in the New Church a warm antislavery community who welcomed black converts and black preaching. And at these meetings she started to have amazing experiences. The feeling of Jesus presence, cool and refreshing and as she would later say, be mean with the beauty of

holiness would wash over her. And it was an experience that she wanted to share, so she started to preach, telling the story of her fight to recover her son. When Methodists from New York City visited and heard her freedom sermons, they were struck. Here's historian Margaret Washington. Once again, They essentially said, your message is too important for you

to be here. She had a kind of specialness about her because of her experiences, because of her capacity to communicate, keeping in mind that her English is not very good, but she's able to communicate with him even with her broken English and her Dutch rogue, in a way so that they find her incredibly inspiring. And she becomes a Revivalist preacher. And there was plenty of preaching to do for fifteen years she taught about the moral reform and

renewal of the nation. In New York City, she opened a Sabbath school in the infamous Five Points neighborhood, known for its theaters, saloons, dance halls, and brothels. Among the other New York Methodists who are preaching a reformed society, though, there was one man who would give Bell her first glimpse at seeing her faith and best impulses exploited by others. He called himself Matthias, and he was among the Methodists who objected when church leaders said that they wanted to

make the Methodist Church less radical and more respectable. Here's Margaret Washington again, by the lady eteen twenties. The Methodists wanted to become just like High Church. They wanted to become like Presbyterians and Congregationalists. All the things that made me tois m a religion of expression, those were left by the wayside, and concerned for the poor, those were left by the wayside. And so people who were Methodists

objected to this. So they left the Methodist Church and founded these little perfectionist cells, and the Matthias Kingdom grew out of one of those Yes, you heard that right. The Matthias Kingdom, you see, it started with the Communal House downtown, a place where these newly independent Methodists could keep caring for the poor and teaching the people that the other church leaders wanted to leave behind, like those

suffering from cholera in New York. Sixth ward not to mention the city sex workers or all of the families who were simply struggling as they tried to find jobs inside the slums. When none of matthias followers were hit by cholera, they took it as a sign they were on God's path. But working in the Five Points put Matthias and Bell in the crosshairs of the law. They were too unsavory for the polished up image of the Methodist church. They made enemies among church leaders, and that

left them vulnerable. After their home was raided by the police, Matthias was thrown into an asylum. When he was released, he decided it was time for his followers to leave the city. But that's when things went sideways. Bell found herself in a mansion outside the cities. Matthias said that his goal, like Aiden Blue, was to form a perfect community that he called Zion Hill. It would be a

place of temperance, clean living, prayer and unity. But when Bell arrived, she realized the reality didn't pass the smell test. You see, Matthias had made some wealthy friends, and from their new center of gravity outside the city, they started plotting a run of real estate speculation downtown. They also threw temperance to the wind. Lavish meals turned to lavish parties.

Lavish parties turned into something more. Soon Matthias was teaching that God had given him the right to other men's wives, and the families in the commune fell into a series of backstabbing, recriminations, and eventually even criminal charges. When one of the men died. That's when one of the women who had been sleeping with Matthias tried to pin the murder on Bell. Here's Dr Washington again. So she wanted

to put the blame on the colored woman. And that would make sense to the average white New Yorker, because part of the attitudes toward black women was that they were loose women. Bell wasn't afraid though. She'd been to court before, as we've already seen, and she had won. And the one of the ways in which she got prepared is she went to an editor and told her story of the commune, which I'm in the process of reproducing, republishing her story of what happened. And she said, as

it's a wonderful quote. I've got the truth on my side, and I can crush them with the truth. Not only did Matthias and his followers fail to pin the death on Bell, but she turned the situation around and sued them for defamation of character, and she won. Bell didn't quite leave the situation unscathed, though. She came out of the Kingdom of Matthias with a new disgust for flamboyant leaders and for how easily the desire for a loving

community could be turned to selfish ends. She also had a renewed reliance on her own internal compass and the voices of spirits who would guide her better than any charismatic preacher ever could. Other tragedies soon followed, though. Bell's son, Peter, who had grown from that five year old boy into a working sailor, died at sea, and the political landscape

in New York was changing too. Somehow, despite their work, pro slavery forces had risen to power Harry in the way of all that tragedy, Bell left the city, and it was this journey that finally led her into a new identity, when the Voice of God confirmed that it was her calling for the rest of her life to travel and teach and to crush her adversaries with the truth. That same voice of God comforted her when a Quaker woman mocked her for still carrying the name she'd had

in slavery. As true as God, as true, the Voice had said to her. So she took a new name, Sojourner Truth. That she could do. It was, in her own words, a name with a handle to it. At the age of forty six, she began traveling between Methodist camps, working, cooking, and preaching both religion and abolition. Unfortunately, Sojourner Truths run in with Matthias wasn't the only time the story of Spiritualism saw predators ready to take advantage of a heartfelt faith.

It seems that as Spiritualism grew, there were more and more wolves waiting in the shadows. Victoria was named after the Queen. We can't be sure why. At the time, it was a tribute that must have seemed even stranger than the Davis family naming their boy for a presidential candidate, especially for a family that lived in a wood shack on the side of a hill in Homer, Ohio. The story goes that the kids in the neighborhood like to run along the rickety porch so that they could hear

the boards rattle. But it wasn't just the house that barely held together, it was the family too. Victoria's spirit ecstasies came from her mother Anna. She had been a poor girl who elevated her station in life by working as a maid for the governor of Pennsylvania. But the governor's son, John, was as venal and entitled as anyone born to wealth and power you can imagine, and as

friends were worse. Friends like Buck Claflin, a law school dropout, put his talents and intelligence in service to his predatory instincts. When Buck fell in with the governor's son and the pair started stealing horses to assemble a private racing stable, he was living in the room next door to Anna. When Buck and Anna married in eighteen five, she was already three months pregnant. Buck and John didn't know which

of them was the father. During their painful marriage, Anna would give birth on average every two years over a twenty year period. She followed Buck when he parted ways with John, but it wasn't for security. They bounced from one Pennsylvania river town to another, while Buck ran taverns and crude riverboats. Here's author Mary Gabriel Buck class and her father was a notorious thief arsonist. He called himself a lawyer, but his main connection to the law was

breaking it. When two of their daughters died of typhus, and his grief hardened into permanent bitterness. Her only solace came in the fervor of her the just visions, and she wasn't quiet about it either. Here's Mary Gabriel again. Basically, the mother would go out and kind of have hallucinations and shout to the skies her problems about her husband and said what she was doing was speaking to it to spirits from another world after dead relatives or her

dead children. The problem was Buck saw Anna's zeal as one more way to play at a game. He convinced Anna to start setting up a table as a fortune teller at local fairs. When he caught wind of the new science of mesmerism. Well, he added that to her act as well. By the time Victoria and her younger sister, Tennessee were born, Anna had a habit of falling into trances and firing invisible energies into her daughters to cure

them when they were sick. By the time her children had survived the vulnerable days of their infancy, Anna was convinced that she had the power to heal. But she went further. Anna told her daughter Victoria that she had other eyes, eyes she could use to see the girl's thoughts, and that when she doctored the girls with mesmerism, she healed not just their bodies, but sanctified their souls as well.

Anna might have gained another eye, but somewhere along the way, Buck had lost one, almost two on the nose for his approach to life. One writer calls Buck a one eyed, one man crime spree, and honestly, that's just about right. With his wife so focused on healing, Buck joined in selling bottles of a life elixir for one dollar each, a mix of alcohol, opium, herbs, and molasses, and it was popular, but Anna probably took more of it than

anyone else. It seems that everything Buck tried his hand out was a con except maybe for the violence that was real enough. He was brutal with his wife and his children. Things were so bad in their household that one of Victoria's brothers disappeared when he was thirteen to escape the family's vicious life. Victoria, though, followed in her mother's footsteps. Religious x to sees, lifted her spirit out

of the violent home. In one of their neighborhoods, Victoria found daily refuge with a woman who fed her, washed her hair, and taught her to read and write. It was a comforting and carrying presence in an otherwise harsh world. But when that neighbor died, the sense that only a different world could provide an escape from suffering lodged into Victoria's heart. She would later say that her neighborhood friend's

spirit was her first visitation. As Victoria wept over the woman's death, the woman's tender hearted ghost took her by the hand, lifted her off the ground, and for three hours the pair soared over Homer, Ohio. Except to her mother Anna, it only looked as if Victoria had collapsed on the floor rather than flying. She lay as if dead for three hours. That wasn't the last time it would happen either. Trances and paralysis became a regular part

of Victoria's life. Then other remarkable thing started to happen around her. Anna reported that once, when Victoria was taking care of a sick baby, the girl fell into a trance and the baby's fever dropped. Years before spiritualism arrived in New York, it seemed that Victoria was already a trance healer. When Victoria was ten, Buck ensured the unused gristmill on the land near their shack for four thousand dollars. Then it mysteriously caught fire while he was drinking at

a nearby pub. When Buck tried to collect the insurance, the neighbors random out of town, but they didn't think that he worked alone. In fact, they suspected Anna and Victoria of helping him set the fire. Buck had been the town's postmaster too, and when he was gone, they discovered a trunk filled with empty envelopes addressed to homer residence. It seems mail theft could be added to his long

string of offenses. In the winter of eighty eight, when the Fox sisters were meeting the ghost of a murdered peddler who claimed be buried in their basement. The women of Homer, Ohio were organizing a fundraiser to pay for Anna's exit. She packed up the kids into a wagon and rattled off over the frozen ground. Hard scrabble years would follow, but so would greater and greater interest in

communicating with the spirits. When he finally rejoined his wife and children, Buck knew that the spirits were on the move. There was never a trusting soul that Buck couldn't exploit, and as always, he took out every scheme, impulse, and outburst on his daughter's Victoria was rarely strong enough to work, though, so Buck began using his youngest daughter, seven year old Tennessee, in his schemes. He dressed up a wagon with a bright red canopy, blue trim, and a playbill announcing the

wonder child who would channel spirits. After their first tour, he roped in the sickly Victoria. In eighteen forty one, he opened rooms at the boarding house in Mount Gilead, Ohio, and broadcast that his fourteen year old daughter, Vick Torria, was a medium. Just like the Fox sisters. She could hold seances, convey spirit messages, and make spirit music. All for the low low price of just one dollar per visit the opiate of the masses. By now, it's a

famous put down of religion. In the eighteen fifties, there were plenty of folks who thought it was a perfect description of spiritualism, and with people like Buck on the scene, who could blame them if the new movement was going to be dismissed as a con game, though, there would need to be some proof. Mediums and their seance visitors

were certainly witnesses to something, but what exactly. When the Fox sisters were sitting at Barnum's Hotel in the summer of eighteen fifty, they convinced many of their observers that there was no better explanation than the one they gave. They were simply well tuned instruments of the spirits. Among those converts was Horace Greeley. He was the publisher of the New York Tribune and a significant intellectual figure in

American life. In August of that year, he wrote in his newspaper that the girls had been put to every reasonable test. They had absorbed keen and critical scrutiny. No one could detect any method of fraud as far as Horace could tell, whatever the origin of the noises might be, he wrote, Leah, Maggie and Kate did not manufacture them. An opposing verdict arrived that winter. You see, the Fox sisters left New York City in the fall and started

touring throughout the Northeast. In December, they spent three weeks in Buffalo. The following February, three professors from the University of Buffalo published a joint letter in the local newspaper. Unlike Horace Greeley, they said they had a better explanation than spirit contact for the strange rapping sounds. It was, they said, simply the popping of knee joints. Leah, managing the public face of her younger sisters, immediately challenged the

professors to of it, which they accepted. The game was on. Things didn't exactly go well for the Fox sisters, though. The tests left the doctors unconvinced, and they didn't mind saying so. But when the professors published their findings, it was clear that they were looking down their noses at the girls from the start. Their report called Leah, Maggie and Kate the Rochester females, and according to some readers. Those doctors had been a little too eager to see

what they wanted in the tests. The report described how the three men gripped the girl's legs and help them in a static position. During those sittings, there were no strange knocking sounds. When the girls were allowed to sit comfortably on the sofa with their feet on the floor and without the professors squeezing their legs, the tapping sounds resumed. The three professors agreed that this was definitive proof that their theory was right. The fox sisters, they claimed, had

created the sounds with popping joints. Here's historian Kathy Gautier ris, the existence of fake flowers does not disprove the existence of real ones. The idea that because there are occasional cheaters, or that an actual medium occasionally cheats, is sort of

easily incorporated into the world view. So if you thought they were ridiculous began with you continued to think they were ridiculous after the Buffalo investigations, And if you thought they were the real deal, but they are just kids put in this awkward position, so sometimes it got slippery, then that's what you thought. This wasn't the most damaging test, though, no that came in April of the same year, when The New York Herald decided to go head to head

with Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. In an article co signed by a doctor and a minister, one of the Fox in laws, Mrs Culver gave some damning testimony. She said that for two years she had believed the knocking sounds were genuine communication from the dead. That is until a recent visit when Maggie was away and Kate asked for some assistance with a seance. That was when, according

to Mrs Culver, Kate showed her how it worked. She said that Kate told her it was the girls who made the knocking sounds by popping their knees and toes in the early tests. Mrs Culver said the girls had accomplices who knocked on the walls from the room next door when necessary. Taken together, these accounts caused to stir The first, the three Buffalo professors, came from people who

leaned on their academic credentials. The second, the New York Herald challenge, came with the flavor of an exposed cover up. Writing on the social standing of religious and medical authorities from both angles. These articles claimed that the Fox Sisters the Rochester females were tricksters and the movement that trusted them as four Runners and champions was based on a

simple prank that had grown into a massive fraud. These debunking effort were all about what was true, but they also carried a whiff of the town meetings in Wisconsin when the leaders of the community got together to shut

down Cora and Mary, who had challenged their authority. On one level, debunking was an attempt to hold back the opportunistic frauds of the world, predatory hucksters like buck Laughlin, But too often it was also clearly an attempt to keep society's reigns in the hands of the professor's, doctors

and ministers who had held them for so long. And of course, being convinced of spirit contact wasn't the only reason that someone might pay a few pennies to step into a concert hall and see young women shuddering entrances on stage, or to slide a dollar over to a medium's manager or an evening's meeting with her in a dimly lit parlor. But spiritual belief was just one of the many conflicting reasons for holding hands around a seance table.

It could also have been a thirst for thrills, for a night of entertainment, or a simple curiosity about something bizarre. Two amateur sleuths, what could be more tantalizing than a chance to go out and do a little fraud detection of your own. But don't take these early attacks on spiritualism at purely face value. Yes, they were assaults on a new and growing movement, but there were something else too, Because when it came to turning tables for a profit,

sometimes even bad press was good business. Cora was headed back to Spiritualism's heartland. She had traveled with her father all over Wisconsin, speaking in trances and working with her German doctor to heal illnesses. But they had received tragic news. Their friend Aidan Blue, whose Hope Dale community was their original launchpad, had suffered a blow. His son, Augustus had died. The boy had only been nineteen, but had also been

an ardent follower of his father's teaching. He was an apt scholar, an enthusiastic reader of European socialist writers, and an eloquent speaker. But now he was dead. Under normal circumstances that might only have required some mailed gift or a message of sympathy. But the times were new, and it seemed that Augustus wasn't done preaching just yet. In fact, word of his death reached Cora and her father before the message that raced over the telegraph lines to the west.

You see, Augustus had begun to speak through Coras trances. From this point forward, he would become one of her most common spirit controls, and he had more words of hope and healing for his country and for his father. So in the summer of eighteen fifty two, Cora and her father boarded the very same steamer that had brought them to Wisconsin, a canal boat called the Globe, to make their way back to New York. By the time they reached their destination, they had a new convert to

Cora's cause. The captain of the boat had suffered from an ulcerous fever sore. When Cora sat with him during the voyage, his pain had cleared and the ulcers started to close. He was just one of thousands who would experience something miraculous in her presence. They brought word back east from Augustus to his family in Hopedale, but also to Cuba, New York, where Cora's father grew up. There

were no Mrs Culver's and Corus family. Her large circle of relatives paved the way for her to speak in school, district houses, and town halls across the county. Despite all the fake flowers in the garden, a medium was blooming in the family, and in the spring of eighteen fifty two that meant something. With Augustus Blue as her spirit guide, Corus trances started to become more complex. Soon it wasn't

just Augustus. Like the crowds of spirits that arrived in Rochester to speak through Isaac Post, a full roster of significant figures appeared in her spirit sessions. She would speak on philosophy, she would speak on ethics. One writer remarked that ardless of whether her lectures were her own thoughts or truly from a spirit control, they would have astonished him, coming from the most accomplished orator in the world. But things changed for Cora when her father died in eighteen

fifty four. Her mother and siblings retreated to the Hopetale community, but Cora's fame had outgrown its shelter. And that's when Cora was invited to join a spiritualist circle in Buffalo, where the university inquisition had wrung the Fox Sisters dry two years earlier. Just fourteen years old, Cora took up the challenge, and it threw her star into the sky. When she arrived, there were plenty of friendly spiritualists to watch out for her when the interrogations came, and come

they did. James Mapes, professor of chemistry there, decided that he would be the first. He challenged Cora to speak for the spirits on geology. The text of the spirit lecture is lost to us, but by the end Mapes was stunned. I have been all my long life an investigator on scientific subjects, he said, but I stand here this afternoon dumb before this girl. More friends in high places followed. One of them was Samon P. Chase, the former senator who had been elected governor of Ohio in

eighteen fifty. A host of other professional skeptics, lawyers, doctors, and scientific agnostics were also baffled by her. At least, that's the story that comes down to us. Not so easily dismissed as a simple trickster. Cora instead directly confronted the man's world of the intellectual elite, and somehow she thrived. The first Spiritual Society of Buffalo ballooned as a result. By the summer of eighteen fifty five. They had to rent out a larger hall for their regular meetings. Of course,

they made Cora their centerpiece. As we've seen though, such a bright light also tends to attract moths, which is where she met Dr Benjamin F. Hatch. As one historian puts it, his m d was um self awarded in his fifties. He had been, like Buck Laflin, a pitchman for a number of cures that he talked to patients under false credentials until he landed on his golden ticket. That is Here's historian John Busher, Benjamin Hatch was alternative

physician in that time. That could mean almost anything. In his case, it meant that he was one who was very intent on using masmerism as part of his tools. He must have projected an air of success. He was convincing enough to Cora's friends and then to Cora herself. In fact, he convinced the girl to marry him after he pulled her out of Buffalo. Benjamin put her name in lights. It was as Cora Hatch that she would

become best known. But the story of Benjamin and Cora would become a major scandal in the spiritualist movement over the next five years. Here's Kathy Gutierrez once again. She was very beautiful, and every single newspaper account of her just fulminates over her long blonde curls, and she was always decked out in a slightly racy outfit. And as for Benjamin, he was, not, to put too fine a point on it, a bit of charlatan and something of a pimp. There is no need to treat him with

kid gloves. After only two years of marriage, Cora was run ragged, exhausted, sick, and trapped. One night in New Haven, Connecticut, a bedraggled Cora burst into a hotel and begged for shelter. She had run out into the night to escape a beating from Benjamin. She was worried that he was going to kill her. One of the guests in the hotel, William Britton, heard the noise in the entry hall. William

was a spiritualist, and he recognized the famous girl. He stepped out with a book in his hand and saw the tears on her face, the fear in her eyes. William covered the cost of her room that night and delivered her into the care of her friends. Soon enough, Cora and Benjamin launched divorce proceedings that would become a snarl of lawsuits, battles for the proceeds of her lectures, and venomous public statements that would stretch out for almost

a decade. And in the midst of that fight, William Brittain's assistants became a rare example of something much needed in the lives of the mediums who would go public with their work kindness. Buck knew how he wanted the seances to work, but Victoria wouldn't cooperate. She would fall so deeply into her trances that she wouldn't respond to his commands, and when she woke back up, she would

be disoriented. And it was important that she did what she was told because Buck was counting on his daughters for his drinking and gambling money. So when Victoria started getting sicker and sicker, he called on a doctor. He called on Kenning Woodhall. He was one of the many who were making their way west to find a place in the world, but Canning came to Mount Guillet, Ohio with the story that bolstered his prospects more than most.

Here's Mary Gabrielle again. Keening Woodhall was supposedly a medical doctor who rolled into Mount Guillet, Ohio, where Victoria was living with her family, and set up a practice. Keening Woodhall was in his early thirties and Victoria was fifteen, and he started wooing her and told her that he was related to the mayor of New York City, and was a relative of a judge in New York, and that he was a practicing doctor, and in other words,

he was everything Victoria Woodhall wasn't. Maybe it was because of these famous connections the Buck decided to ask him to treat Victoria, and his first prescriptions seemed promising enough. A healthy diet, school lessons instead of seances, and regular walks in the fresh air. On one of her walks, Victoria ran into Channing in the street. He asked the girl to come to him to Mount Gilead's Fourth of

July picnic. She agreed and sold apples by hand until she had stashed enough money away from Bucks Clutches to buy clothes for the event. Afterwards, when he was walking her back to her family's door, Canning ling down and said, tell your father and mother that I want you for a wife. Anna saw a way to get her daughter out from under Buck's predatory thumb. Buck saw the same thing, just from his own point of view. He confronted Canning

and told him to stay away from Victoria. But despite these attempts to keep her under his control, Victoria slipped out and married Channing anyway. She had known him for only a few months, but an escape was still an escape. It turned out to be a terrible one, though sure. Canning was less harsh than her father, and he taught her some social graces that she had never learned at home, but it also gave her a long hard look at

what was beneath his veneer of respectability. Canning was not, as he claimed, related to judges and mayors, but he was an alcoholic and a morphine addict. His medical credentials matched Benjamin Hatches too, and to put a punctuation mark on all the lies, he spent the third night of their marriage at the local brothel. Soon enough, Victoria was a teenage wife without love or money, She followed Canning

from tavern to brothel to tavern. Six weeks into their marriage, she found a letter in her husband's jacket from his previous mistress. By the middle of eighteen fifty four, Victoria had left Ohio and the Clafland clan behind her. Winter found her living in a Chicago tenement. She was pregnant, far from home and trapped in a marriage with a

counterfeit doctor. She would later write, I soon learned that what I had believed of marriage and society was the merest sham, a cloak made by devotees to hide the realities and to entice the innocent into their snares. The deep suffering and dis illusionment of those experiences would take

roots in Victoria. Over time, they would fuel a fire that would burn so hot it would threaten the central pillars of the society that allowed men like Matthias but Claflin, Benjamin Hatch, and Canning Woodhall to wield so much power over the women in their lives. Victoria didn't know it then, but there were already a host of people working to challenge that society and to bring something new into being. And they were nowhere more active than in the town

of Northampton, Massachusetts. That's where sojourn Or Truth found her way into their company. Here's Margaret Washington. Northampton was a very special place. First of all, it was founded by William Lord Garrison, the head of the American Anti Slavery Society, founded by his brother in law. That made it sort of an entrepole for anti slavery. The next headquarters after

Boston was really rot Chester. Northampton was in between. For individuals leaving Boston and that area to go into the Midwest. To speak, then Northampton was a stopping place for them going that way. It was also a stopping place if they were going to go north. It was also an important underground railroad entrepos All of the reasons that someone would want to be in Northampton as sort of the core of anti slavery in the East were there for Sojourner.

The friends at Northampton lived in rustic Plaine farming quarters. It was a refreshing contrast to the brawl of life in the Five Points or the hypocritical indulgence of Matthias's mansion. Besides, Sojourner had finally found a community that prided itself on equality of races and the equality of men and women too. The air was full of ideas communal living, transcendentalism, abolitionism, and of course they were also discussing the ideas of

Andrew Jackson Davis. When his Harmonial Philosophy reached Northampton. Some in the group found his writing verbose, redundant, and derived. In their eyes, he was just a poor man's Emerson. In light of her history with Matthias, Sojourner was suspicious of spiritualism's preference for talking with the spirits of the dead overhearing from the voice of God. As her friends read Davis's book, Sojourner rejected his approach to Christian teaching.

He denied the doctrines of the Trinity, original sin, and the miraculous conception of Christ. Throughout her life, Sojourner had seen enough miracles and enough sin for his new visions to leave her unimpressed. Once, in eighteen fifty one, she visited Rochester and stayed with Amy and Isaac Post. She was there at the right time too. The Posts were forming a seance circle, and they invited Sojourner to join them. The spirit knocking did come, but it came faint and low.

There were long gaps in between, nothing to set your traveling feet to if you were a woman on a mission. In the words of one writer, so Journer listened with all her soul until her patients ran out. She leaned down to the floor and called out, come, spirit, hop up here on the table and see if you can't

make a louder noise. She clearly knew how to keep her head and her sense of humor when she was less than convinced, But her own beliefs still shared too much in common with Davis's to keep her completely apart from her spiritualist friends. In reality, she agreed with much of what they believed about the afterlife. After all, she had been speaking with the spirit of her father for decades, only she didn't need a table to do it. Not every medium wanted to change society. Some just wanted to

float above it, like our Scottish friend Daniel Hume. The day he held his seance with Maria Hayden was a turning point for the spread of spiritualism to Europe. She took the voices of the spirits with her to harvest converts in the Old world, but Daniel hadn't quite tapped every well in American soil. After Maria's husband William published his story of their seance, Daniel never again had a

spare moment. Every day and every night he had people clamoring to see the power of the spirits turned tables like Cora. He was flooded with invitations from doctors and scientists, from ministers who wanted to put his spirits to the test, and from writers who wanted to see for themselves if the stories were true. When the voice of a spirit helped him find the missing will of a dead man in Ohio, Daniel made the story his banner. Finding the

document allowed the man's niece to inherit the land. It was a point of pride for the young medium, and no surprise, it put him in the most charming lights imaginable. Through his new communication with the spirits, justice could be done for the women of America, who were so often built of their rights and property and were suffering from losses at the hands of powerful men and tilted scales. There was a new way to be made whole again

by Daniel's telling. That new way was him. There were plenty who were ready to hear his White Night stories too, and as Daniel started to travel around New England, he was supported by a string of benefactors who shielded him from scrutiny. In eighteen fifty one, when the Fox Sisters were being ridiculed by their relatives and the faculty at the University of Buffalo, Daniel was befriending former Presbyterian minister George Bush, who taught biblical languages and ancient literature at

New York University. Daniel then hopped over to poet, journalist and lawyer William Cullen Bryant. After that it was Harvard engineer and economist Vid Aims Wells. Their report on the violent energy of the spirits at his seance, with shocks that shook the room, cemented their belief that there was some powerful intelligence manifesting through him. Of course, he was also a man, so no one bothered to restrain his legs.

Where the height of the scientific community and the intellectual sets came down heavily on the Fox Sisters, those same forces actually assisted Daniel Humes rise, but as we'll soon find out, they weren't the only forces lifting him up. 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. A group of prominent citizens in turn organized their own spirit circle in eighteen fifty six, which included members of the Savoy nobility and even the vice president of their parliament, But under pressure from the Catholic Church, that group didn't last more than two years. In Spain, the response was even more dramatic. They're The Bishop of Barcelona called on

the military to help. He had heard that a Spanish bookseller ordered a shipment of spiritualist books from France, and they were arriving on a French steamship called the L Monarca. They whispered that the captain was a known smuggler who had used compartments in the ship to transport government fugitives and forbidden literature. From the bishop's point of view, El Monarca might as well have shipped the books direct from the fires of Hell. When the ship landed, soldiers marched

aboard and toward apart. They carted the books into the city square and threw them into a bonfire. The drifting spiral of smoke was all the levitation the bishop wanted, but there were some who claimed that, just like the mob in Hartford, the book burning had the opposite effect. When Barcelona's citizens realized what was happening, a crowd gathered. First there were just murmurs, but then someone shouted down

with the inquisition. Soon the boldest people in the crowd rushed toward the flames and snatched burning fragments of paper. The declaration of forbidden knowledge ended up drawing curious citizens like moths to a flame. An underground network of spiritualist societies had formed, and it was spreading. Un Obscured 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 control remading 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 Minkey. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit i heeart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.