S2 – 6: Restless

midst of a crew who were spooked by shadows. But his private diary tells a different tale. In the days after Elishah rebuked his men for ghost hunting on the ice, he had his own series of visions that left him shot waking dreams, he called them, and they were intense. One minute, he wrote, he was on the frozen ship. Next though, he was transported back to his family home, right into the dining room, and the whole family was

gathered around the table, feasting and laughing. He would have held onto that vision as long as he could, but it seemed like a trance that was out of his hands. Until that is a few days later, when he was trying to build a fire, and a strange glow, like a spirit light, surrounded his hand in the darkness. He wondered if this was the end, if he was preparing

to cross over into the spirit world. In the end, Elisha and his men only survived the unrelenting cold because they began to meet Inuits who lived in Greenland's icy heart. The local people found the men trapped on their ship and started to trade them the supplies of food they needed to endure. Some of Elisha's crew quit the expedition altogether and their old lives to go live with the

Inuits permanently instead. Eventually, Alisha gave into the realization that clinging to his mission would only leave him on a dark threshold to death. Store setting aside his pride, he and his remaining men finally abandoned the ship, but they were far from clear. Their journey would take them overland for more than one thousand miles. Along the way, they

were helped by more indigenous people. They fed Elisha's men and even stepped in to drag the whaling boats that Elisha's crew were using as sledges, each filled with heavy supplies. It wasn't until August of eighteen fifty five, after twenty seven months of travel, that Elisha and his remaining crew were picked up by another ship on Greenland's south coast. When he sailed back toward the United States, he knew he was leaving members of his crew behind him in Greenland,

both alive and dead. Back in New York, he was welcomed as a hero, and the public clamored around him. Of course, there was someone else he wanted to see, though, and she wanted to see him. But it took two days for him to fight through the press to finally reach Maggie's side. All the while, rumors about their not

so secret engagement began to enrage Elisha's wealthy family. Speculation about their relationship had been published in the New York papers, The Post, The Express, and The Times, among others, and none of it made the Cane family happy, so they resolved to throw their weight into separating the newly reunited pair. Maggie would later write that seeing Elisha again after two years was joyous and passionate, and when the Canes leaned on Maggie's family, the other Foxes started once again to

beg Elisha to leave her alone. In response, he retreated to Philadelphia, but he did visit New York as often as he could. Maggie held on as best as she was able. She still didn't rejoin Leah and Kate seances and continued to study with Elisha's friends, hoping she might yet earn his family's approval. For his part, Elisha feed wishly worked on his next book about the recent journey, already under contract with the Philadelphia publisher, the time was

stretching on. Eventually, Elisha was tired of waiting for his family's approval. On an afternoon in September of eighteen fifty six, when Elisha was visiting Maggie in New York, he sent a call throughout the house. He summoned Kate to the parlor where he and Maggie had been talking, and then he called for Mrs Fox as well. Even the household staff were requested. Once they had all crowded into the parlor, Elisha lined them up. Then he took Maggie by the

hand and made a pronouncement. He and Maggie were husband and wife, and they declared their love for each other right there in front of all of them, And that was that Their common law. Marriage was sealed after that night. Elisha's letters were filled with endearments to his wife, Calling Maggie Mrs Kane, he showered her with diamonds. The two still lived apart for the time being, but he had survived Arctic ordeal and they wouldn't be stopped from enjoying

his return. Despite his best efforts, though anxiety started to creep in. You see, Elisha wasn't feeling very well. He told Maggie not to worry, that he had written her into his will just in case. Besides, his aches and pains were nothing compared to living apart from her. The pain at the center of their marriage may have felt cruel and unusual to Elisha and Maggie, There's no doubt about that. I think any of us could sympathize. But it paled in comparison to the marriages of other mediums

in the spiritualist community. For them, life was an endless parade of suffering. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. Still just sixteen, Victoria found herself in a constant battle to keep both her husband and her young son alive. She lived in Chicago, but the city never felt like home. And her time there had left her with scars. For one thing, leaving Pennsylvania hadn't stopped her husband, Canning's carousing.

In fact, he'd been drunk when Victoria delivered their baby, Byron, in a house so cold that one of her biographers described the icicles clinging to her bed post while she was in labor. In the following days, she nearly died. It was only thanks to the quick and caring intervention of a neighbor and then a fortunate visit from her mother that Victoria made it through alive. Canning barely worked, although if we're honest, that was probably for the best.

What his potential patients really needed was a real doctor. But Canning's hard living meant Victoria and the baby were often left hungry. Victoria turned back to holding seances, but it just wasn't enough not to mention that Chicago was still a bit too close to her father Buck. Here's

author Mary Gabriel. She couldn't continue as a spiritualist and make the kind of money she needed to support Canning, Byron and her entire family, and in fact, by this point she wanted to get rid of her family because Buck had had some more run ins with the law, and Victoria was old enough now to realize that he was a scoundrel and always would be. Victoria knew she couldn't go on having like this, so she aimed her sites where so many others had before, to the West.

Anyone as frost bitten and weighed down as Victoria must have at least considered the desperate move that she was about to make. In a bid to inspire her husband to start a new life, she loaded him and their son onto a steamship, their destination san Francisco. Now, if Chicago had been boisterous and full of vices to trip

up Canning, well, san Francisco was downright bedlam. After gold had been discovered in California, the state's population of white settlers had balloon from fifteen thousand to over three hundred thousand, all in the span of just seven years, and San Francisco was at the heart of that change. In ety eight, there were roughly four hundred residents camping in the muddy

marshes around the Bay. But that was the year that President James K. Polk stood before Congress and confirmed the rumors he held up fourteen pounds of gold in his hand and asked his fellow Americans to become colonists again, to go west, to settle down there, and to raid the soil for riches. The message was loud, clear, and compelling. By the middle of the eighteen fifties, San Francisco's population

had grown from four hundred to forty thousand. One young observer published a book that was critical of the boosterism that San Francisco got in the press. In one of his most famous passages, he wrote, I have seen pure liquors, better cigars, truer pistols, larger bowie knives, and prettier courtesan's here than in any other places I have visited. It is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish

the best bad things that are obtainable in America. Of course, if this account was meant to drive treasure and pleasure hunters away from California and had the opposite effect. So by the time Victoria arrived with her family in tow, the city had already begun to rise. Here's Mary Gabriel again,

with a deeper look. She broke away and went to the one place that promised, possibly the hope that caning could in fact resurrect some kind of medical career in a in a town like San Francisco, which was barely discernible as a town. It was just beginning to have cobble stone streets. It was a place where I think that the ratio of men was ten to one, ten men to one woman. It was lawless. It was the main motivation for people. There was self enrichment. That was

the only thing that drove them. But if Victoria heard there was opportunity in San Francisco for women, she wasn't misled. Women were opening clothing stores, restaurants, hotels, theaters, brothels, and laundries, all catering to the flood of California's new fortune seekers.

One woman, who didn't have the money to pay her fair west, took the journey on credit, opened a hotel in San Francisco when she got there, and paid back seven hundred dollars to her drivers six weeks later, and she was soon making five thousand dollars a week, equal to about one fifty dollars today. It was more than five hundred times the weekly pay of a woman working in a Massachusetts silk mill. San Francisco was a gold

mine for white settlers in more ways than one. But for as canny as Victoria was, she didn't have that kind of business acumen. What she did have, though, was beauty, ambition, and tenacity, so she did find work. She answered an advertisement for a cigar girl in a CD saloon and was put to work behind the counter immediately, but she didn't keep the position long. Here's Mary Gabriel once again. There was one area called the Barbary Coast, which is

where it's most notorious. Early early claim to fame was where the tapless waitress was born, and the story is that the proprietor told her she was too fine to do that kind of work, which is essentially, no doubt probaly some kind of form of prostitution. When Victoria refused to play along, the saloon keeper center on her way, remarking that she would need to rough it if she was going to make a living in his part of town.

He must have taken some pity on her, though, because he sent her off with a twenty dollar gold piece. It was enough to give Victoria a moment to breathe and rethink her options, finally deciding to see if she could snare more income. Using her skill with a needle and thread, she started going door to door offering to work as a seamstress, and her services were thankfully met with some demand. One afternoon, though, one of her clients

interrupted Victoria's work. She and the woman, an actress named Anna, had become friends. During their long afternoons spent fitting and fixing stagewear for the evening performance, and Victoria told her new friend that she was making only about three dollars a week, barely enough to keep the family afloat. Between caring for Byron, room and board at the hotel and Canning's constant donations to the wishing well at the bottom of every pint glass, Victoria was always running short. Anna

had a better idea. She urged Victoria to become an actress, and then practically hauled her onto the stage. Now, maybe Victoria was able to draw on her experiences as a medium, or perhaps she was just a quick study. Either way, she was instantly able to command her parts. Like Emma before her. She had moved from the seance table to

the stage. Back in the spotlight, Victoria thrived, and more than that, her first week on stage earned her fifty two dollars about fifteen hundred today, and after all she'd been through, I can't help but imagine that she sighed with relief. Finally there was something new on the horizon. Hope, Victoria and others weren't the only ones to travel. Soon enough, even the spirits were criss crossing the nation. And it's

no surprise why. For Americans who wanted to imagine their nation as expansive as the land it inhabited, the idea of the West was a place to hang their hopes. While spiritualism had been growing and spreading, so too was the idea that the United States had a manifest destiny to take over every inch of land on the continent, which brings us back to the writers and historians we talked about in the last episode. Men like George Bancroft

and William Cullen Bryant. Remember bold visionaries like sojourn or Truth and Aidan Blue were calling the nation to be remade. They knew that America had inner demons to battle before it would live up to their ideals. But Bancroft and Bryant saw things a different way, and we could add other people to that list as well, including a man named Walt Whitman. Like William Cullen Bryant, Walt Whitman was a poet who had turned his literary power to journalism

as well. He edited his own newspaper in New York called the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. He liked to think that he was every bit of visionary as writers like Frederick Douglas. But let's take a look at the actual shape of his vision. Buckle up, though, because sadly it gets ugly. But don't take my word for it. His own words were damning enough when it came to taking land women, claimed that the energy of European settlers made them a superior grade to everyone else on the continent. Again, his words,

not mine. In his view, the violence that had been visited upon the native people's in the land between the Rockies and the Pacific was only natural. The strong prey on the week, he said, and they also take the gold. That was his view. The historian Bancroft felt the same way. He wrote that human progress always went westward, Crossing the Atlantic was a final great stride. He thought that America was the peak of some realization, and that progress had

reached its highest point in the institutions of the United States. Thus, somehow he argued that the extermination of Native people was necessary. In fact, he wrote that anyone who did not accept white mastery was marked by destiny for destruction. The evil in that view was pretty thorough. I know. It was also a fairly common among literary and political circles in New York at the time, But it also provided an excuse for the long history of genocide that had recently

included Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policies. We can see how sojourn or truth would point it out as a troubling national sin, with writers like Bancroft and Whitman driving the conversation in the eighteen fifties. It should come as no surprise that when gold was discovered in California, white settlers marched west in unprecedented numbers, weapons in toe. Even the water route to California was carved open. Under that kind of thinking, there was so much money to be made.

Attitudes like these and the thinking that motivated them, convinced reformers like Aidan Blue that the nation needed reinventing. He was preaching against greed, against slavery, and against war when the United States invaded Mexico in the eighteen forties, and there was no mistaking that these ideas came from the spirit world to push back against the powers of this one.

Here's historian John Busher Blou was by that time giving sermons to his followers in a sort of elevated trance state, supposedly under the direction of spirits, because there were rappings going on all around the room. But after ten years of spirit communications, things in Hopedale were still on rocky ground. In fact, despite being one of the brightest beacons of the reform movement, hope Dale had actually begun to flounder. Aidan Blue had hoped that his son Augustus might one

day take over as the leader of their community. The young man's death might not have ended his speeches, after all, Cora and others had begun to channel his voice for the rest of the community, but it wasn't the same as having the young man's energetic presence. Then there was the financial side of things. When Cora and her father came back from Wisconsin without having established a new outpost for their community, its residents fell to fighting over limited resources.

You see, hope Dale had been established as a joint stock company, but by eighteen fifty five, one relatively new member of the group had managed to collect three fourths of the company. This man's brother had also been a long standing follower of Aiden's, and the pair worked to pile up the ownership of the community. Then they threatened to withdraw and bankrupt the rest of them. That is, of course, unless the other leaders gave them total control

over hope Dale's silk business. With no other choice, Aiden and the others folded. Of course, the new kingpin promised that all the residents could stay. They could still bring in new relatives, go to the community church and teach in the local school, and they could keep working in his silk mill. Naturally, but the character of the place had changed. Once it had been a Christian socialist commune, Now though it was nothing more than a company town.

Aiden had lost his model community. He'd set out to remake the face of the nation. Instead, that nation had crept in and taken control. Aidan Blues experiment in optimism was over. It felt new, but that wasn't entirely true. What the spiritualists created in the eighteen fifties was actually made from pieces snipped out of older fabric. In her book, Kathy Goodierres called spiritualism the frontiers spirit brought to bear on the afterlife. That's more true than we have yet explored.

We talked about Swedenborg and the Shakers in the first episode of this season. Then with Sojourn or Truth, we saw the influence of African spirituality, even when they didn't always put it in these terms. It's clear the spiritualists knew how much they were taking from non European spirit beliefs. But from the beginning, one thing that was definitely knew about American spiritualism was the appearance of Native American ghosts.

Here's Historian and Browdie spirit guides. Indian spirit guides are part of a longer American tradition that dates back long before the spiritualist religion emerges in the eighteen forties. There is this ability in American culture to espouse positive views about Native Americans at the same time that one assumes that they are people of the past who are dying away and who are appropriately part of the past that is part of the land of the spirits. In New York.

Emma noticed this right away as she left her Broadway career to become a medium full time. She observed that Native spirits played a prominent role in the seances of American spiritualists. She would later write that nearly every medium is attended by a Native spirit. She expressed the opinions of many American spiritualists when she wrote that those spirits

were kind and generous. They were guides for the white spiritualists, counseling, protecting, and using their knowledge of herbs to suggest rare cures for diseases. Her way of talking about Native nations in some way echoes what Alisha wrote about the Inuit people he met in Greenland. But like most spiritualists, both of these writers saw Indigenous Americans as the supporting cast for

stories of white exploration and white healing. Sadly, Emma's writing describes the beliefs and practices of Native nations as bygone relics, resources to be mined by white mediums that would otherwise be buried in the past, and in doing so, she ignored the suffering and the strength of Native nations across the United States. In a sense, it showed the ways that spiritualism had absorbed, rather than reformed, the American imagination.

Cora's spirit lectures played apart in spreading this style of revelation. In eighteen fifty one, when she was still living in Wisconsin, receiving spirit messages from Augustus Belu and healing the sick, there was a third spirit that became one of her controls. Here's John Busher once again. I think the first spirit control that she had was the son of Aiden Blue, Aidan Augustus Blue, who died early in his life. She also had it developed a series of Indian spirit controls.

One of them was named Weena. One of them was named Shannandoah. There were a bunch of those as well. As Cora grew in prominence, Weena continued speaking. Her story is part and parcel of American spiritualism's influence, and when Cora had her fateful confrontation with J. J. Mapes in eighteen fifty four, the first spirit control to speak to

the scientist was Shenandoah. Cora and other spiritualists didn't always have relationships with Indigenous people, though, in fact, in many of these trances, the native spirit guides sound very much like the white fantasies coming from the fiction of the time. Here's more on that from Ann Browdie. Spiritualists participate in ideas about romantic ideas about Indians that have already begun

to develop and are developing in American literature. Indian guides of mediums often just scribe a place they describe as the summer Land, a land of natural beauty and an undisturbed natural land where Indians live in peace and harmony as to white people, and where there is no conflict between the indigenous inhabitants and those who have displaced them. So spiritualists participate in the fantasy that Indigenous America and a European dominated America can live in harmony and can

be part of the same spiritual vision. But that's a fantasy in some cases, though, where Cora spoke for the spirit of someone familiar to an audience member, it didn't always go so well. Once in Boston, she gave a trans lecture from the spirit of a well known Boston abolitionist, and one of the dead Man's friends protested. Afterward. He wrote a scathing letter to the newspaper saying that Cora wasn't channeling a genuine spirit, but rather than I quote,

confiscating and misusing the man's name and ideas. He wrote that Cora's lecture was nothing but a mash of false quotations, words which he never used, and ideas which he never thought. If that was how some people responded to Cora's speaking in the voice of people they knew, we can only imagine what an actual Native American audience might have thought of her use of Weenaw and Shenandoah. But we do know one thing. To her audience in Boston, she was

no better than an actress on a stage. Victoria made a splash. The members of her San Francisco acting troops said that there was a simplicity about her that was very convincing, charming, even she somehow managed to convey a powerful spirituality from the stage. Indeed, just as Victoria had not managed to outrun Canning's thirst, neither had she outrun

the spirits. One night, when Victoria was playing a part in an adaptation of an Alexander Dumas story in which twins, although separated at birth, continued to fill each other's pain, something about the play broke through Victoria's mind, her soul, and her spirit. Later in life, one of her friends would write that Victoria was so overcome with emotion that night that she plunged into a trance. Her vision was open to the spirit world, and she was transported away

from the stage. When things came into focus around her, she saw her younger sister Tennessee, along with her mother. They were looking out a window over Ohio's hills, and both were calling on Victoria to come home. As the story goes, she bolted from the stage, still dressed in the pink silk dress and slippers of her costumes. She ran through a foggy rain back to her hotel. Then she packed up their few belongings, dragged Canning out of whatever watering he was in at the time, and bundled

Byron up for a journey. The very next morning, she loaded them onto a steamship and began that long journey back to New York. Victoria's trip home from the West sounds like the trip Cora took up through the Erie Canal a few years before. Under the power of spirits. All the way throughout the voyage, Victoria experienced such vivid trances that she created a profound excitement among the passengers. At least that's what her biographer wrote. But if the

next phase of her career is any indication. She also found herself growing in power as she spoke to the passengers and the crew. She said she could tell, just by inspiration from the spirits, what their names were, where their homes were located, and what their maladies were. Like other spiritualists of the age, Victoria had become the healer that her husband never was. Soon enough, the steamer returned to its homeport in New York, and then Victoria continued

on to Ohio. Her future in New York City would have to wait. When she arrived home and flew into her sister's arms, she told her the story of her on stage vision. Amazingly, Tennessee was wearing the same striped French calico frock that Victoria had seen in the vision. Their mother offered a smile, but there was no surprise there.

On the day that Victoria had been shocked out of her performance and back to her family, Anna claims that she had commanded Tennessee to send the spirits after Victoria and bring her home. Looking back, it seems to have worked. Reunited by the work of the spirits, the sisters set out on a new chapter, away from her home and family.

Victoria had found the vision and courage within herself to chart her own course rather than be directed by the predatory and hairbrained schemes of her father and her husband. She was reborn, if her biography is a reliable account, From that point on, she was determined to follow only what the spirits would direct, and direct they did. The two sisters set out for Indianapolis, rented rooms in the Bates House Hotel, and then announced to the public that

they were a pair of mediums. Ready, she later wrote to treat patients for the cure of disease far away in New York. That was the very thing Maggie Fox wished that she could claim to be anxious at Elisha's sickness. Maggie felt the joy of their marriage slipping away. It vanished even faster for Elisha too, He was constantly wrapped

up in thoughts of his death. Besides, the two of them were still separated, the relationship with each other still confined to scraps of paper delivered between cities, and no spirit did Maggie's bidding. But they were about to be separated by an even greater divide, because Elisha had planned a journey to England. He was going to meet with the family of his hero, Sir John Franklin, even though

he had never located the explorers remains. When Elisha left on October eleven, eighteen fifty six, just a month after they were married, he asked Mary to stand in the doorway so that he could see her until the last moment his carriage pulled away. Before he had gone out of site, though, a carriage lurched to a stop, and he rushed back, begging Maggie to tell him whether he

should go. Sorrowfully, Maggie sent him along. Here's author Nancy Stewart. Finally, he's supposed to go to England to be honored by the Royal Society and to have reception all Whitehall and all kinds of other dignitaries. And he arrives there in October eighteen fifty six. And his plan is, now that he's married her, he's going to support Maggie with the proceeds from his book. And there's a way that they have secretly had some intermediary who can get her letters

to him in England and so on. Because his family is still watching very carefully. It's just really heartbreaking. Despite his disapproval of Maggie's career as a medium, Elisha had come to respect the social role that Maggie had created for herself. It broke new territory for women like her. Spiritualism put girls and women in front of crowds and grasped their attention like never before. Even the theater, with its winking implications, had never conferred such authority on a medium.

In one letter, Elisha wrote that when crowds attended his lectures, as he said, to hear the wild stories of the frozen North, he started to see the similarities between his work and hers. He believed he was giving the people something true, thrilling them with stories of new horizons. It echoed what Maggie told him about bringing the spirits near. It made him wonder when people came to hear lectures about his years locked in the ice, the mysterious wraiths,

and his starvation in frozen harbors. Were they really coming to learn science or something deeper. Maybe they were coming to him for the same thing they wanted out of Maggie. I sometimes feel that we are not so far removed, after all, he wrote, I am no better than the rappers. I confess that there is not so much difference. When he landed in Liverpool, Elisha was flattened for two days by a racking cough, but never wanted to shrink from a challenge. He summoned the energy to press on to London.

Sir John Franklin's widow met him and found him to be charming. She also urged him to gather his strength and continue with public campaigning to please her. He pushed himself too far. The daily stream of letters from Maggie couldn't hold Elisha back from death, store though perhaps in part because so few of them actually made it through his family's dragnet. Then a delegation of his friends and

family reached England and swept Elisha off to Cuba. They had hoped the warmer climate might save him, but the journey to Havannah turned out to be more deadly than his trip to the Arctic. After he suffered a stroke at sea, it seemed the only thing Elisha's family had truly managed to shield him from was Maggie's loving words. One of the last things he ever wrote was utterly gut wrenching. It was an urgent plea for his wife to write him something, anything, a second stroke sent him

on his final journey. He passed away on February of eighteen fifty seven. His body was taken to New Orleans on a steamship, then up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to Cincinnati, whereas Coffin was loaded onto a touring train. It made stops in Columbus, Baltimore, and beyond as it headed east. An American hero and a son of science, his corpse was honored just as his exploits had been.

Elisha Caine's scientific career was put to rest along with his remains, although the tide of American science and conquest rolled on to honor his memory and his wishes. A grief stricken Maggie was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church that August, and she swore that she would never hold another seance again. While Maggie Moore and a Lasha's death, her sisters Kate and Leah were still fighting for Spiritualism's life.

America's churches hadn't snuffed out spiritualism at Hartford or anywhere else. It's universities hadn't either, but they were determined to try again. This was they thought a job for Harvard men. At least, that was the attitude around Boston in eighty seven. That's when one of the local newspapers, The Courier, decided to put some money in the game. They offered to pay five hundred dollars to any medium who could present satisfactory manifestations.

It was a small fortune equal to roughly fifteen thousand dollars today, and as a hub of spiritualism, Boston offered up many mediums who were willing to be put to the test, and chief among them was Dr H. F. Gardner, a man who had been a leading light and austin spiritualist circles for years. Of course, academics had tried this sort of thing before, The University of Buffalo had given it their best shot, But Harvard had Louis Agassi, a biologist and geologist who was widely respected by a whole

generation of scientists, to test the spiritualists. He was joined by Eban Horsford, Harvard's chair of chemistry, and Benjamin Pierce, Harvard's professor of astronomy and mathematics. In the context of that era, it was a star studded panel. A Gardner worked to bring his own stars to the stage two. They gathered at Boston's Albion Building on June eighteen fifty seven.

Sisters Leah Fish and Kate Fox were Gardner's heavy hitters, brought in from out of town, but they had a supporting cast of local mediums who were ready to show Harvard spiritualism's true power. For that purpose, they built a pine platform in the center of a room to serve as a sounding board for the spirits, and then they put a light pine table on top of it. On the first day, with everyone arrayed around the room, Leah and Kate climbed onto the platform and kicked the events off.

The tapping sounds started almost right away. Then it rose in power until finally it was hammering on the pine boards. It seemed the spirits wanted to make themselves known. They were ready for questions. The Harvard group circled around the demonstration table. Horseford started to ask a series of questions. The tapping started up again, but Leah frowned. The other spiritualists in the room started to mutter the replies are confused,

They said, something wasn't right. At one point, Gardner turned towards the Harvard delecation and suggested that maybe the spirits were trying to show the stuck up academics that they weren't going to be trifled with. They're trying to make sport of us, he told them. Somehow, this wasn't very convincing to the investigators. The mood soured and they called it off for the day. The following day, Horseford entered

the room carrying a sealed m velope. When the parties had arranged themselves to contact the spirits, he slid the envelope onto the table ask the spirits, he said, to tell me what it says inside, But all of them sat frozen. The silence stretched on as the clock ticked. Finally it was Gardner who sat up. He said the spirits had spoken to him and revealed that there was nothing they could do, and outside influence, he said, was absorbing and controlling their power. Eventually, one of the Boston

mediums grabbed a sheet of paper. As their hand began to twitch, they put pencil to scrap and started to write. After a moment, they leaned back. The Harvard men approached for a better look and found four blocks of unintelligible script covering the page. No one in the room could say what it meant. The mediums started to go in and out of the room. Each time, Gardner would say that the spirits were speaking outside and would only communicate

when the unbelievers weren't there. The professors just shook their heads and adjourned the second day. On the third day, it brought more of the same, nothing from the spirits under test conditions. The mediums accused the investigators of disturbing the necessary harmony of the energy. The investigators lost their patients and called the whole display excessively silly and inexpressibly tedious. Meanwhile, the Boston Couriers reporter scribbled down his thoughts in the corner.

Gardner stopped over to him and growled in his face, accusing him of being the one to disrupt the spirit communication. Before they quit altogether, someone in the group suggested they try one last test that didn't require knockings on the table, So they called the Davenport Brothers forward. Here's historian Emily Clark.

The famous Davenport brothers, William and Ira had this large cabinet in which both of them would be bound, and then the audience would hear musical instruments being played after they were closed in the cabinets. They're even tests to prove that they weren't playing the instruments themselves. Horseford tied their wrists himself, and then Professor Pierce climbed into the cabinet with them. When it was closed, Pierce gathered all

the musical instruments and piled them beneath his legs. Two tambourines, a fiddle, banjo, and a tin horn. If the spirits could still play the instruments, they'd have to do so by evading his guard. After sitting in the dark for ten minutes. The only thing the cabinet produced with silence. As far as the Courier was concerned, the failure of the Davenport brothers sealed the matter. The paper and its Harvard professors declared spiritualism and I quote, a ridiculous and

infamous imposture. They exited the test facility with the same amount of indifference and contempt they arrived with, denied the prize money, and now taking a beating in the press, Kate and Leah Rich needed to lick their wounds. Now every one of the sisters felt themselves adrift. The heats of Maggie's short, secret marriage froze in the creeping chill of Alisha's death, and she was also now struggling to win a contest for money. You see, Elisha's parents controlled

his personal effects, including his writings. Maggie tried to claim the financial legacy that Elisha had promised her, but his family claimed there was no mention of her in his will. But then again, they also refused to let Maggie or her friends read it. They even tried to pry Elisha's love letters out of Maggie's grasp. For the time being, she was left with nothing but her own loss, and they're on ending hatred. But it wasn't just Maggie whose

financial future was torn to pieces by disaster. In fact, it was most of the nation. By the end of eighteen fifty seven, things were on shaky ground around Wall Street. Some were saying the railroads driving west had over extended themselves. Others thought that political trouble in France and England had pulled Overseas money back to Europe. Then one of America's

largest banks collapsed due to an embezzlement scandal. If things were going to hold together, new money needed to come in, and wealthy New Yorkers knew just where to find it. Gold was on its way from California, one and a half million dollars worth of it, in fact, and on a single ship, a ship of gold that would calm investors and put anxieties to rest. But it never arrived. On September twelfth, news reached the city that a hurricane had traveled up the Atlantic and caught the ship as

it steamed along the coast of South Carolina. It foundered in the stormy waves and sank two hundred miles from shore. One by one, and then all at once. America's banks collapsed. Whatever gold they had was pulled out by panicking investors. One Wall Street lawyer wrote in his diary, all confidence is lost in the solvency of our merchant princes, and with good reason, every last one of them has been

gambling in stocks and railroad bonds. By the middle of October, every bank in the country except one had closed its doors, and the nation found itself smothered by a deep depression, just like the heart of Maggie Fox. 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. Born to a Quaker family and a fan of Swedenborg's mysticism, Whitman followed an

interest in spiritualism throughout his whole life. In fact, the older he got, the deeper he went. He even began to see himself as a medium, and even wrote that poets are divine mediums. Through them come spirits and materials to all the people. Whitman also sought out the friendship of the Universalist minister in New York, who had worked with Andrew Jackson Davis to transcribe his spirit lectures in

the eighteen forties. Together they attended seances by a spiritualist named Thomas Lake Harris, a medium who wrote mystical poetry while in his trances. It was just what Whitman liked, and when Whitman attended a Cora Hatch spirit lecture, he was so inspired by her that he became determined to develop his own powers of spirit communication. Put it all together, and it adds up to one big mess. We'd like to believe that the connection between spiritualism and social causes

like abolition were simple, but we've seen by now. Rather than being a neat and tidy bundle of threads woven into a beautiful story, those connections were more of a snarl knot the good and the bad all mixed together, judging by life in New York at the time, though none of that should come as a surprise. Unobscured was created by me, Aaron Mankey 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 as a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minkey. For more podcasts for my Heart radiocasit i heeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

listen to your favorite shows. Four