S2 – 7: Preach the Word

She was a professional woman, a genuine celebrity. In fact, while other mediums had been played for fools by predatory managers, Leah had stepped in and taken control of things for her family. She had fought Elisha Caine to a standstill when he tried to take Maggie. Yes, he did convince her sister to give up spiritualism, Bliah convinced him that a stipend should come her way. Her experiences had taken her to some of the greatest cities in the nation.

She had navigated unfriendly crowds at gunpoints, and held seances sittings for some of America's most respected politicians and ministers. She had even been married a second time, although that man, Calvin Brown, had died four years earlier. So yes, Leah seemed to have done it all, but when the Boston Courier printed their rejection of spiritualism, their shots hit home. They hurt, but Leah took comfort in finding friends on

her own side. If the Boston Courier used their investigations to attack the Fox Sisters, well competing Boston newspaper, The Traveler was there to defend them. The Traveler printed a statement saying that the real sham was the investigation those Harvard professors had refused to cooperate with the mediums. Even the Cambridge Chronicle acknowledged that the professors were too biased. Leah took some comfort in that, but even having friends to return fire could only go so far towards getting

her back on her feet. She and Kate retreated to New York, where they stayed with their mother at Horace Greeley's house, and for a while Leah only gave seances two familiar circles of friends around the city, until one evening, when they accepted an invitation to hold the seance for a small circle in Jersey City, New Jersey. A man arrived to escort her, a little older than she was. He was dressed in well tailored clothes and offered her an umbrella to hold off the falling rain. He introduced

himself as Daniel. Underhill Talia's relief, the man was already a spiritualist, to Leah's deep interest. The man was the president of an insurance company and had managed to hold onto his money through the recent crash. The seance that night was something remarkable. You see, Lea's seances had recently been accompanied by spirit lights, like the ones that had been witnessed in seances by Daniel Hume, luminous clouds, sometimes as small as a spark, that would flit and flicker

outside the seance circle. That night, they held a seance around the table as usual and got the ordinary knocking sounds, but Leah also pulled a few of the visitors aside, one by one. She says, she picked the ones with good sense, and Daniel was among them. They stepped together into the complete darkness of a bathroom there as they dared to hope, the spirit lights arrived. But these weren't

clouds on the edge of visibility. These lights blazed. They were so bright they lit up the entire room, and Leah and Daniel were dazed by them. Leah said the lights were so bright that her hands started to burn and she felt faint. She turned on the faucet and ran her hands under the water, and then, together with the hostess, ran out into the backyard, where she pushed her hands into the rain wet ground. The spirit lights faded.

The seance concluded, and Leah made her way home. It was only two days later that a letter arrived for Leah with a curious question. The day after the seance, it said, the hostess had looked out of her house and witnessed lights coming from the ground where Leah's hands had been. She examined the spot and found particles of solid phosphorus smoking in the soil. A few of the visitors that the seance had gathered to argue about what

it meant. Some of them believed that this was a sign that the spirits had manifested their lights by manufacturing phosphorus from the atmosphere. Others thought that the phosphorus had been a tool used by Leah to artificially manufacture the lights. Now they were asking Leah to explain it to them. In her own words, she was painfully astonished by the accusations that she could be faking the lights. It hurt her so deeply that she didn't know how to respond.

But a champion appeared. Her new friend, Daniel Underhill, was convinced of her innocence. As Leah would later put it, he came to her rescue to fight for her reputation and integrity, first among her friends and then in the public forum. And as far as Leah was concerned, he won those fights. But he also won her heart, and it turns out that he was smitten with her too. By the end of the month, they were married and she was settling into his brow own stone on New

York's West thirty seven Street. Then she set about filling it up with things that were very much to her, liking gilded wallpaper, rosewood chairs, mahogany tables, new carpets, statuary, and of course for her music, both at piano and an organ. To this, Daniel added an aviary, which he built off the dining room, filled with songbirds he bought

from distant places. Suddenly living the best life his money could buy, Leah shocked her family and the interested public with an announcement, no more investigations, no more public seances, no more tests. Her career as a public medium was over. The only people to pass the defenses of her newly fortified life, she said, were those who already admired her. As always. Family was an exception, family like Maggie, still

mourning the loss of Elisha Caine. Maggie often avoided her older sister, but the newfound lap of luxury provoked her, so she struck back. The next time the two sisters faced off, Maggie looked Leah in the eye and said, now that you're rich, why don't you save your soul? The backlash of Leah's rage tore them apart. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. Sojourn Her truth was no stranger to a good fight. She was also no stranger to saving souls.

But after the lavish disaster in the Kingdom of Matthias, Sojourner could never view wealth as a key to the afterlife, or even to happiness. When she found her home base at the Northampton Community, it did nothing to slow her down. Years before, she had received a call from God to be a traveler. Sojourner so, even with a place to lay her head and a circle of friends who supported her, she still had a mission, and that mission put Sojourner in the line of fire. In her day, so called

circuit preaching was hardly safe work. Wherever camp meetings were set up, they were followed by drunken, hostile men so often that they got a nickname the rowdies, and they deserved it too. Carrying clubs and bringing a taste for violence, they became a regular menacing presence at revival tents, and they threatened worshippers and speakers alike. It should come as no surprise, then, that they often targeted black attendees. Sojourner never lacked for courage, though, and she brought a power

to her lectures that moved audiences everywhere she went. Here's historian Margaret Washington. To be a powerful speaker, first of all, you had to have pathos, you had to have humor. You had to sing. She had a beautiful singing voice, and she would often begin with a song, then she'd have a prayer, and then she would speak. Her speaking was instructive. She would always talk about her life as a slave and her experience. So Journer's messages from the

Spirits took some share of the credit. One young seminarian, Giles Stebbins, joined some of his family at Northampton, despite opposing their views at the time, and he was a young hothead who loved to start trouble what sort of trouble while he decided to start making public arguments in support of slavery while living in an antislavery commune, but he was surrounded by a community that interpreted the Bible as they say, in the light of liberty, filled with

preachers and teachers like Sojourner Truth who had heard all his arguments before, face to face with people who didn't think he was all that convincing, his message fell with a thud, but it gets better. Within a year of settling in among the others at Northampton, he switched sides, eventually preaching the message of radical abolition, and like Sojourner, Giles would also go on to become a lifelong spiritualist. But Northampton wasn't just a place for young bullies like

Giles Stebbins to visit their family. In fact, it was there that so journal would reunite with her own family. Hurt two daughters, Sophia and Elizabeth, arrived with so much joy that others at Northampton compared the reunion to the return of the biblical chronigal Son. So Journer had lost touch with her daughters when Sophia had to fight her mother and moved in with a man who took advantage of her. Now just eighteen years old and pregnant, Sophia

sought refuge in her mother's company. As the bay Bes birth approached, so Journer split her time between her travels and her family. It was the only thing that could keep her off the preaching circuit. In the following years, the family grew into a close unit. Sojourner and her daughters would care for each other for the rest of their lives and always stay in touch when they couldn't

stay together. The pain of separation had been deep. Now they were determined to hold onto each other through whatever life tossed at them, and not all of it would be easy. The community at Northampton began to slowly dissolve as its various members with their own ways to new homes and new missions. So Journer eventually bought a house in town there for herself and her daughters, although she

continued to travel and teach. For a time, she made her way to Rochester and lived with the posts their home became her new lecturing base while she traveled to the surrounding towns. She even held one of those gatherings in Rochester's Corinthian Hall, where the Fox sisters had made that first public spirit demonstration. When the Foxes next came into town to visit the posts, they befriended Sojourner as well. She grew in power over the years as she traveled, lectured,

and faced new challenges. Here's more from Margaret Washington. As she became more and more experience, one thing we don't have any record of her ever having talked about was Matthias. But as she got more and more experience than her speeches would often when she got into the meat of it would reflect things she had heard other people say that she would pull apart. She also because she knew so much scripture. I mean, for a woman who couldn't

read and write, she could quote scripture. In one meeting held by antislavery speakers, a minister stood up and shouted that he hadn't heard anything convincing, just a lot of noise in his words, from women and jackasses. In the shocks silence that followed, Sojourner rose to her feet, and

reminded the man of a biblical story. In it, a prophet was writing a donkey along the road when the donkey suddenly stopped without warning, the prophet beat the animal, But that's because the man was blind to what had really happened, the presence of an angel that was blocking the way she tells the story, and she says, so, I just want to remind the man and the audience that it was the ass and not the minister who

saw the angel, and the crowd just went wild. With her knowledge of the Bible already at hand, it didn't matter to audiences that Sojourner couldn't read. But there was

only one Sojourner truth to go around. The printing presses in Rochester, Boston, and New York City, though, could send out spiritualists and abolitionist papers by the thousands, and it was their work in producing the public argument for abolition, along side the circuit writing preachers and traveling lecturers that fan the flames that she lit against the horrors of slavery. Who would get burned, though, was still up for grabs.

So Journer went to Boston with fists clenched tight. It was eighteen fifty four and thousands of reformers were converging on the city for the New England Anti Slavery Convention and for the Women's Convention. If that was all, it would have been exciting news, but recent events had charged the meetings with passion. You see, in May of that year, a man named Anthony Burns had escaped from slavery in

Virginia before being arrested by the authorities in Boston. The police there had decided to obey the Fugitive Slave Act by sending him back to captivity, but Boston abolitionists wanted to say in the matter too. Inspired by armed rescues that had taken place elsewhere, they gathered weapons and marched on the courthouse on the evening of May. The crowd of both black and white abolitionists fought a pitched battle in the streets with the Court's deputies wielding revolvers, axes, clubs,

and cleavers. They tried to ram down the courthouse door, but were beaten back. Nine of the abolitionists were arrested, and their attempt to save Anthony Burns had failed. President Franklin Pierce eventually had to send military forces to escort Burns to a ship in the harbor that would transport him back south. So Journer was in the crowd that day, held back by cavalry and marines. On July four, the

Massachusetts Antislavery Society held a meeting in Burns honor. When so Journer stood to speak, it had been two years since Frederick Douglas had delivered his famous lecture What to the Slave is fourth of July. Now she stood before them to remind her audience that every northern city and town that followed the Fugitive Slave Act by sending their neighbors south into bond it was working to uphold the slave system. When Henry David Thureau followed her on the stage,

he addressed the issue from another angle. Many people in Massachusetts had been very concerned about the expansion of slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, but for years, he said, they had talked about the problem as something big yet far away. But when slaveholders could reach into the North and use the Boston Police and US military as a tool, that

problem stopped being a faraway thing. As throw put it, the whole military force of the state is at the service of a slaveholder from Virginia to enable him to catch a man whom he calls his property, but not a soldier is offered to save a citizen of Massachusetts from being kidnapped. In the past, th Row had mocked spiritualism.

He said he would prefer the revelation of hooting owls and croaking frogs to the knocking sounds, and that if the spirit messages that passed through mediums were a true sign of what life would be like after death, he would exchange immortality for a glass of beer. But he stood side by side with those spiritualists in eighteen fifty four. That was Boston, though in New York things continued to

roll forward in a tangle. In our previous episode, we talked about how the Brooklyn poet Walt Whitman embraced white supremacy as a means to conquer the land, but that's not the only way he was. Unlike the Row. 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 comes

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 women liked, and when women 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 snorl 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. Slavery had been illegal in New York for years, but the city had been built on slavery. That much

was clear in the view from Horace Really's house. It was now the home to the Fox family, but whenever Greeley returned to the city, they always had a room open for him. In June of eighteen sixty, Greeley wrote an editorial in his New York Tribune under the title the slave Trade in New York It is a remarkable fact. He wrote that the slave traders in this city almost invariably managed to elude the meshes of the law. Now they bribe a jury, another time their counsels or agents

spirit away a vital witness. Slave trading had been punishable by death in New York since eighteen twenty, but the brutal business carried on. In fact, not a single slave trader had been executed by eighteen sixty. It made Horace write that to break up the African slave trade, it will be necessary to purge the courts and offices of those pimps of piracy who are well known, and at

the proper time will receive their just desserts. It wasn't clear how soon that time would be, though, so journ or truth story, like her battles against her neighbors to bring back her son from Alabama can help us see how the riffs over support for slavery didn't just split North from South. They split communities everywhere, even in the

anti slavery North. And it's no wonder. In seventeen ninety, just before Sojourner was born, some counties in New York had a higher proportion of slaveholding families than South Carolina. Their way of thinking about the world didn't magically evaporate when New York abolished slavery. It just went underground, and the New Yorkers who profited from slavery didn't lose their

connections to the South either. Greeley tried to point out that New York was still a major hub of the Southern slave trade even though it was now illegal there, whether as investors, ship owners, or captains and crew, New Yorkers promoted and practiced human trafficking, and Greeley's Tribune wasn't the only paper to publish this kind of report. The Local Evening Post reported in eighteen sixty that the city of New York belongs as much to the South as

to the North, and they made that clear. As the nation's politics came to a boil in the presidential election of eighteen sixty which pitted Abraham Lincoln against Stephen Douglas. Every county around New York City voted for Douglas. Months later, in January of eighteen sixty one, when South Carolina seceded from the United States and protest, the mayor of New York called a meeting of his allies. He suggested that living under the federal government of the Lincoln administration was,

in his words, odious and oppressive. He suggested that New York City follow South Carolina's example. They should succeed, he said, and become a nation unto themselves. Taxes for businesses would be low, and the slave trade could continue. And some of the city's bankers and merchants were quick to sign on to this new idea. A few newspapers through and with them as well, the city's council even approved the idea. It was exactly why writers like Frederick Douglas knew they

needed to start their own newspapers. There were others around him, too, like David Ruggles, who had started as a free black grocer in New York before becoming a newspaperman himself years before on an early September day in the eighteen thirties, Ruggles had opened his door to the knock of a young Frederick Douglas, who had just escaped his captivity in the Baltimore Shipyards. Ruggles had mentored Douglas there in New York,

even hosting the man's wedding in his living room. When he moved from New York, Ruggles found a home in a more welcoming community in Northampton, Massachusetts. There he edited his own newspaper, The Mirror of Liberty. It served as a powerful inspiration for Douglas, showing the younger man what was possible with the printing press and a message. Here's

historian An Browdie. What periodicals provided for them was the ability to form non geographic communities, communities of like minded people who did not see each other face to face. So you see the seeds of the virtual communities that

have become so important in the digital age. In the periodical press of the ninete century, you could subscribe to a periodical published in Chicago or Milwaukee or Boston, no matter where you lived, and you would receive it through the mail, and you would see on it the names of other subscribers in your small town or in your state. But there's more. Here's historian Mary Gabriel. It was really fascinating. And it wasn't just in the United States. It was

in Europe as well. Every organization, every political party, every group, the farmers groups, the coal group, you know, coal miners. Everyone had a periodical when the spirit spoke from the pages of black newspapers like The North Star. They offered a vision of liberty and a quality for Black Americans that was frequently repeated in the spiritualist press. And as we've mentioned before, spiritualists were also launching newspapers of their own.

From the beginning, the treatment of spiritualism in Southern newspapers was chilly at best. One paper in eighteen fifty one railed against the buffooneries of the Foxes and the Fishes. Spiritualists, they wrote, were ardent zealots, weak minded enthusiasts, and gullible dreamers. The following year, in eighteen fifty two, the New Orleans Daily Crescent reported that Thomas Lake Harris, the spiritualist poet who Walt Whitman like so much, had arrived in their city.

He was staying at the Veranda hotel for the winter and was willing to receive visitors in his room for private seances, but it wasn't published as an advertisement. The paper claimed that he was trying to raise an army of converts to his new faith and warned that some of the respectable citizens of New Orleans were leaning his way.

Years later, when Southern states started succeeding, they also started rejecting shipments of spiritualist newspapers because they considered them abolitionist publications. The war of words and ideas fought in the eighteen fifties was leading towards something darker. The isms of the North were scorned in the Southern press, viewed as attacks that threatened the wealth and power of slaveholders. But those

attacks we're just beginning. New York was filled with conflict, and it wasn't just struggling over questions of slavery and abolition that put spiritualists at the center of the fight. Even as the identity of the nation and its relationship to the abuses of slavery fueled round after round fighting, spiritualism itself was still on trial in New York. The tests undergone by the movement's most prominent figures sometimes took

odd turns in the headwinds of history. That was clear to see in eighteen sixty when Maggie Fox, now in her late twenties, a Catholic and a veteran performer, but also a reformed spiritualist, agreed once again to be party to an investigation. Maybe it was Kate who convinced her. Because they took this test together. They weren't alone either. There was a huddle full of spiritualists floating out on the water because it was a day for public spectacle.

The city of New York might not have executed any slave traders, but they were still willing to execute people like the notorious pirate John Hicks. A six day trial had convicted him for murdering three men at sea, and when his confession followed, he admitted to a wild story of jumping ship to ship, leaving a trail of dead behind him. His final crimes were described in action packed detail and were published alongside a full phrenological diagnosis of

his mind. But for anology wasn't the only tool to be used on him. There were also plenty of others who wanted to see what would happen when he crossed that boundary between life and death. For that, they decided spiritualist mediums were just the people to call. On the day set for his execution, crowds lined the streets to watch him go by. He boarded the steamship called the Red Jacket, accompanied by a core of marines and to federal marshals. The spiritualists were already on board the ship.

They made for an island in the middle of the harbor where the gallows waited for him. Here's historian Kathy Gutierrez. So there's this floating seance basically that is surrounding this island with the expectation that at the moment of this guy's death that they would be able to communicate with him. It was also something like a floating reception. In fact, refreshments had been set out for the gathered mediums all while the execution moved forward on his way to the noose.

Hicks didn't seem to show much interest in the spirit ritualists, but they were hoping that in the presence of so many powerful mediums like the Fox Sisters, who were so attuned to the spirit world, his death would produce some kind of amazing spiritual revelation as his soul departed his body, but those hopes were dashed. In fact, Hicks was hanged with hardly any notice or additional fanfare. Here's more from

Kathy Gutierrez. Well, embarrassingly enough of the spiritualists, much like graduate students, were so excited about the free food and drink, that they completely missed the hanging. And we're busily chowing down on the cucumber sandwiches and new communication whatsoever took place. It was another huge embarrassment for those who wanted spiritualism

to finally be proven in the light of day. The critics decided to rub it into writing that the pirates spirit had been dispatched so speedily that he flew right past the watchful eyes of the mediums. The incident was so embarras a scene that it simply was left out of most spiritualist writings. But there was another hanging that spiritualists and abolitionists were keen to get into the papers, the execution of John Brown, or the raid on Harper's Ferry.

Brown had already been a hero of abolitionists before he attacked the arsenal in the hope of arming a slave revolt. He'd once liberated eleven people held in slavery in Missouri and led them over eleven hundred miles through four states, dodging federal troops and a volunteer militia along the way. Afterwards, he met with Frederick Douglas and other leaders to recruit them into his plan to fight slaveholders elsewhere. Captured later

in Virginia, John Brown was sentenced to hang. Oddly, the Virginia state government forbid any journalist from a northern paper from witnessing the execution. One man, Henry Steele Alcott, was able to evade this prohibition, though, and sent his report back to the New York Sun. Alcott would play a later role in this Spiritualist history that will explore in future episodes. For now, though, the important thing is that he got his message out, and because of that the

news spread. Brown was mourned and celebrated. At the same time, Harriet Tubman, who was at one point planning on joining John Brown at Harper's Ferry, told one Spiritualist editor that it wasn't really John Brown who had been executed, It was christ from his exile in the English Channel. Victor Hugo agreed. He wrote a letter to friends in Haiti, stating that what the South slew was not John Brown

but slavery. Abolitionists and radical spiritualists agreed. John Brown's body might have been rotting in the grave, but his soul was marching on. It had always been about carrying messages, whether we can count beginning of Spiritualism from the Shaker Girls, or from Andrew Jackson Davis, or even further back from Sojourn or Truth's messages from her father. Spiritualists had long felt they had a responsibility to pass along the word

from beyond death. So in eighteen fifty seven, spiritualists in Boston founded a newspaper that would do just that, print messages from the spirit world. It would be one of many spiritualist newspapers over the years, but whether they knew it or not, it was a monumental moment in the history of their movement. Their newspaper would tell the amazing stories of the mediums who delivered all those messages to

their say once circles. They would become the foundational voice of spiritualism for decades, and they called it the Banner of Light. I don't think many historians would contradict me if I said that the two most important periodicals were The Banner of Light, published in Boston, the longest lived and most wide we read of the spiritualist periodicals, followed by the Religio Philosophical Journal in Chicago, which was really the voice of the Midwest. For many in the North.

It was precisely the message of radical reform coming from the spirits that attracted followers to spiritualism, even while its claims to prove contact with the dead remained in doubt below the Mason Dixon line, though that picture was often inverted. Where we have evidence of spiritualism catching on among wealthy white families, it was often achieved by cutting off the idea of a reformation in the spirit world. Take Sarah Morgan,

for example. Her diary would make her one of the most well known recorders of Southern life among Louisiana's prominent families. Her father was a respected judge in Baton Rouge, her brother was a judge in New Orleans, and her family numbered among Louisiana's most wealthy. Sarah would read the newspapers with her father, and they got word of the table turning and spirit knocking in eighty eight. In the following years,

those spirits populated Sarah's world. When her brother Jimmy traveled to England, he wrote home describing a seance he attended, and Sarah herself tried to summon spirit knockings alone at home without success. After her father, brother, and husband all passed away, Sarah longed to communicate with them, so she turned to spiritualism. It said that she would end each of her daily deliveries of flowers to their grave sites

with a visit to a local medium. When rumors began to surface that her late husband had slept with the families governess, the medium delivered his spirit into the room, where he assured her that he had been faithful. Despite what other white Southerners might have said, Sarah never gave up her enthusiasm for speaking with the spirits of her dead family. As she got back on her feet and began to travel, she made regular stops at seances around

the world. She sat with mediums in New York City, London, and Rome, interpreted dreams, and talked about the personal prophecies she had received from spirits, but their messages were rarely more significant than news about her own life or people in her family, and she carried a lifelong hatred for the North and its radicalism, a hatred that would blossom in the eighteen sixties when two more of her brothers

were killed during the Civil War. But a spiritualism that ignored the call of liberty and freedom wouldn't have sat well with Sojourner truth In fact, as she got older, she turned her eyes to the west, and a tour through Pennsylvania, she met white farmers who were laying plans to move westward. They said they wanted good men and

women to work their farms on shares. Conversations like that convinced her that if black families went west, they might be able to find a place to become self sufficient. Her dream of future prosperity was golden fields of grain, rather than the gold mines of California or Colorado. That seemed to be the most popular choice. But it wasn't just future process verity that attracted her. It was also the need for abolitionist voices raised among the settlers on

west Land. So Journer had preached social reform in the rough and loud New York of the eighteen thirties. Now she saw the need to bring a voice of liberation to the lawlessness of the West. At the eighteen fifty six Anti Slavery Convention, Sojourner laid plans with friends who called themselves the Anti Slavery Apostles. They vowed to transform the American West, and they wasted no time. Their mantra

was no union with slaveholders. So Journer set out immediately to organize anti slavery meetings throughout Ohio and finally Michigan, and it was there that she found a town that was already a thriving spiritualist hub. They even had their own commune there called Harmonia, founded by Quakers. It was full of similar ideas to Northampton or Rochester, and so Journer felt right at home. In eighteen fifty seven, she bought a plot of land outside Harmonia and chose her

new home base. It didn't slow her mission down, though, because there were souls to be won, but not everyone, it seems, was heading west. Emma Harding was never shy, and she was paying attention. After all, she read the newspaper. It had only been in print for a year, but the Banner of Lights had already claimed the top billing amongst spiritualists across the nation, plus with mystics like Thomas Lake Harris taking up residents in New Orleans and families

like the Morgan's embracing spiritualism. The editors of the Banner of Light felt that Louisiana had something for them to see, so in eighteen fifty six they crossed the Ohio Valley and the Mississippi River to lecture on spiritualism in New Orleans, and despite the reputation of their northern religion, the city lit up on their arrival. It's set a precedent and became an inspiration. The next year and Harding laid a course for her seance tables in New York to the

National Spiritualist Convention in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Then in August of eighteen fifty nine, she would hit the road. Her first stop was Memphis, Tennessee, then Evansville, Iowa, and then a trek through Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas. From the first days, though, Emma was met with a violent reaction. At her first Tennessee lecture, someone outside the hall where

she was speaking through a stone through the window. It rolled to her feet, while glass shattered onto her audience. Things only got worse from there. The Memphis Inquirer published an editorial calling Emma an outside agitator who threatened a favorite Southern institution. No one was confused about what that meant. She had flown south on the winds of abolition. Emma's last lecture in Memphis was ultimately canceled when a group of rowdies threatened to lynch her and anyone who came

to hear her speak. She tried to counter the acusations of being a Yankee infidel by pointing to her British birth, but papers along her route continued to burn her to the ground before she arrived. Further death threats fell on her in Tennessee and South Carolina. Later, Emma would write that at every turn on the tour, she saw the bitterness of slaveholders toward the advocates of freedom. So it should come as no surprise that she arrived in New

Orleans feeling weak and dispirited. But that weakness soon became a demonstration of strength. Here's historian Emily Clark. She's delivering a lecture in New Orleans at one of the Fraternal lodges, and she begins to get tired. Now she'd been lecturing on spiritualism and demonstrating for a while now, so she's tiring and her spiritualist demonstrations are suffering. As this is going on, a black Creole man was walking by and he's supposedly seized by a spiritual force that pulls him

into the auditory him. Emma invites him to come up on the stage, as she says, because he is full of electricity, and he and Emma Harding have this spiritual affinity, it seemed. So he remains with her on stage, and she uses that connection between them to draw power, and she continues these demonstrations for a couple more hours, just leaving the audience enthralled. If they were enthralled at this connection, though anyone who knew the man wouldn't have been surprised.

His name was JB. Valmore. He was a blacksmith, but that was just one of his jobs. He was also known as a remarkable spiritual healer. In fact, Valmore's blacksmith shop had become a meeting room where he would hold seances and receive visitors who wanted to be healed by his power, and he had been doing that work for years. Just one year earlier, the police had rated Valmore's house in the middle of a seance on the suspicion that

he was practicing voodoo. Many white folks in New Orleans were afraid of being spiritually attacked by their black neighbors, so they used the police like a tool to combat that fear. In fact, ever since the successful revolt that one Haitian independence from France in eighteen o four, whispers of voodoo among white slaveholders had escalated into violence. In eighteen fifty, the state rule that free blacks didn't have

the right to organize religious groups. In eighteen fifty five, those rules tightened further forbidding scientific, literary, and charitable societies

as well. But there were some in the Afro Creole community of New Orleans who counted spiritualists among their number, and in the coming years they would work with Valmore and others to form an enduring partnership, a harmonial circle that would record remarkable seances, and along the way, they would also bear witness to some of the most terrifying moments in the city's history. Now that you're rich, why

don't you save your soul? That was the question Maggie had thrown in her sister Leah's face after seeing her rise above troubled times on a ride of insurance money. We can imagine that something similar might have occurred to

Emma Harding as she finished her Southern tour. She said she witnessed the horrors of slavery as she traveled through the Deep South for her own part, she faced day after day of Southern ministers who shouted at her, proclaiming slavery to be a divine institution and calling Emma an infidel who sought to overthrow the divine order. But in the final stops on her tour, she found devoted spiritualists

who were beaten down by their world. They were looking for hope, and Emma saw little of that divine order around them, especially when she talked to women who crowded in so close to her lectures that they overflowed the seats to sit and stand on the floor. They needed a vision of another world to lift them out of their life of suffering. As far as Emma knew, that world was already open to them, and the spirits led

the way. When she steamed into Mobile, Alabama, though Emma was met by signs on the wall, they announced a new order from the state legislature, no infidel lecturer was allowed to speak anywhere in the entire state. Here's historian Molly McGarry. Before the Civil War, the Alabama and South Carolina legislatures prohibited sciences and other gatherings in their states, which I found particularly interesting because we know the way that religion was prohibited and was seen and for enslaved

people as a way to organize. So some religious gatherings at certain times in different states across the South were made illegal. But the fact that Alabama and South Carolina bothered to put this newly into their laws to suggest that perhaps there was something going on, and that the spread of spiritism, like the spread of the abolitionist publications that were making their way south from the North, was

seen as particularly dangerous. Despite these warnings, Emma was met with so much interest that she held seances three times a day, but her messages weren't encouraging. Under the guidance of the spirits, Emma foresaw the conflict between the North and the South coming to fruition. What she meant by that was simple enough. War. Emma declared that the piece

of Alabama would soon be broken. Days were coming she said that would be full of mourning and lamentation, although many of the people she encountered on her travels they're already seemed to be living through a portion of that. In eighteen sixty Emma headed back north. The Spirits had a plan for the South, but she certainly wasn't necessary for their fulfillment. They had already been speaking before she arrived, and they certainly weren't about to stop. 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. By eighteen sixty three, with two years of the war behind her, Cora now channeled the spirit that cried out for and I quote a holy crusade to eliminate slavery and redeemed the land from its bondage and its sin. This new message directly aligned her with the radical Republicans and their liberal social reforms,

and with President Lincoln's rhetoric about the war. In fact, Lincoln spoke of the fighting as a national blood sacrifice that might cover the nation's sins of slavery, which, of course had been sojourner truth's message for years. In fact, few traveling speakers campaigned harder for Lincoln's reelection than she did, but other spiritualists did join her at meetings cross the Northeast. Once Neddie Colburn was a featured speaker at a campaign rally.

In her trance, the Spirits offered his gathered supporters the kind of certainty that forecasters today are always hoping for. The Spirits were certain that Lincoln would win. Later, Sojourner traveled to Washington and met with Lincoln, but their conversation, as far as we know, was little more than a brief exchange of courtesies. Other mediums, though, would get far closer to the president, and not always for the best.

Loun 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 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 Minkey. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit diheart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.