S2 – 9: Wounds

a war hospital. Still, he was promoted through the ranks as his fearlessness made him a strange figure on the battlefield. Crosby got to know one of the doctors who treated him, and they started writing letters to each other. His willingness to face fire after such dire injuries must have puzzled the doctor as much as it impressed his fellow soldiers. Crosby explained his daring. You see, he was a spiritualist.

Every time he stepped onto the battlefield, he said, he felt the presence of his spirit friends all around him. Their guidance was so real that he lost all awareness of fear. In his own words, the whizzing of musket balls produced no more trepidation than the falling rain and Crosby wasn't the only soldier to say so. Other spiritualists in the Union Army claimed that spirits had led them through tremendous fire as well. If his faith was shaken by the wounds that shattered him, he didn't let on

when he died. The Doctors published a note on Colonel Crosby's life in the Banner of Light. It was a testament to spiritualists that the dead leaders who met them at the seance table also steered them through the battlefield. Like Crosby, they had led the nation to the end of the war, covered in scars, yes, but still fighting to the last. He died in the final confrontations of

the war that forced the surrender at Appomattox. Perhaps he shared the same feeling that Lincoln expressed to one of Nettie Colburn's dire yet vague warnings about his own coming death. In her memoir, Nettie wrote that the President told her, I shall live till my work is done, and no earthly power can prevent it, and then it doesn't matter. But it didn't matter. It mattered to the spiritualists. When news of Lincoln's assassination reached New York, the community railed

in shared grief. They asked Emma Harding to give a lecture at the Cooper Institute and address their shocked hearts, and spiritualists across the country met in their local groups to grieve their loss, although maybe they grieved less than others who didn't share their beliefs about life in the spirit land. While most members of the New Republican Party mourned Lincoln's death, the Republicans of the Sirk Harmonique in New Orleans didn't feel the pain of his loss so deeply.

In fact, he was closer to their fellowship than he'd ever been before. At the end of that year, when President Andrew Johnson declared a national Day of Thanksgiving, the er Harmonique hell the seance. They've been meeting again for a year ever since. On re resigned his commission, but he wasn't just holding seances. He was also holding office. In eighteen sixty five, On rehelped create the Friends of

Universal Suffrage. Their political vision was filled with the fire of the idea universal education, black male suffrage, and distribution of land by the states to the heads of families. So when Lincoln spirit appeared to the Sir Carmonique. Of course, he gave their political vision his blessing. Here's historian Emily Clark. Abraham Lincoln's first appearance to the Sir Carmenique is on December seven, sixty five, about seven months after his assassination.

His spirit noted how he was glad that they had broken the chains of slavery, but he also recognized that there was a lot of work still to be done. Um. You know, we shouldn't start patting ourselves on the back, Justine at He also talks about how those who tried to stop the progress of freedom would regret those decisions after death, where you know, those who had suffered for righteous causes would be blessed by God and happy in

the spirit world. You know, freedom was something that was created and ordained by God, and while freedom originated in heaven. His spirit talks about how it's intended to reign on earth to um and then he signs off the message like he does many of them. With your brother and friend,

Abraham Lincoln. The work of making sure that a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are created equal would endure the blood spent to perfect the nation would not be wasted, The unfinished work of freedom would advance further than ever, the new birth of liberty would grow to maturity. It was an assurance that the Sir Carmonique would need to help them reshape the nation in the mold of the idea, and it was the fuel they needed to empower the

next step forward reconstruction. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Mankey. Lincoln was dead, and yet he was everywhere. In fact, Abraham Lincoln visited far more seances after his death than he ever could have in life. He was, after all, the representative of justice and liberty to many, but he was also a man with a family, and could anyone have been more devastated by his loss than Mary Todd Lincoln.

Here's historian John Busher. I looked in detail at the last moments of Lincoln's life before he passed away and the following moments, and discovered descriptions of the physicians being asked by Mary Todd Lincoln too cut her a lock of hair from Lincoln's head. Mary didn't keep the hair, though she passed it on. She hadn't taken it for herself, but rather so that she could give it to her

spiritualist friends Cranston, Laurie's wife and daughter. They must have told Mary that they could use it to hold open a channel to Old Abe. With the lock of his hair, they could reach across the border to the spirit world, just as they had done for Mary after she lost Willie in eighteen sixty two. Even more, the lock of

hair that they got was gruesome. Today. It's kept safe by the Chicago Historical Society with a label that reads taken from President Lincoln's head after he was shot, cut from the spot where the ball passed through Washington, d c. April eighteen sixty five. You can find the Historical Society's image online too, clearly showing the hair still clotted with blood. But for many spiritualists this would mean that it's still was charged with the mental energy that left Lincoln's body

on his death. Like so many of the mysteries of spiritualism, Lincoln's murder was immediately put under the scrutiny of investigation. A new unit of intelligence agents was responsible for solving the case. The Secret Service, formed from Alan Pinkerton's National Detective Agency. They had served as spies for the Union Army during the Civil War, and surprise surprise, Pinkerton's home had served as a stop on the underground railroad in

Illinois through the eighteen fifties. Born in a Scottish slum, Pinkerton had abandoned his efforts to reform Britain and started over in America. After he established his detective agency, he set them to work in the service of helping people escaped slavery, but he assisted powerful interest too, including the Illinois Central Railroad, and that work put him in touch

with the railroad's attorney, a man named Abraham Lincoln. So when Pinkerton was brought into the war, he started by foiling an early attempt on the President's life in eighteen sixty one. Now, though he had a new and more sobering task, tips and evidence began flooding his office, so he recruited an investigator with a talent for sorting through

mountains of paper. This man began his career as a journalist for the New York Tribune and was the very same reporter who'd knocked south against Virginia's embargo to report on the hanging of John Brown. His name was Henry Steele Allcott, It seems that after his turn as an undercover reporter, Alcott had enlisted in the signal core of the Union Army. When illness sent him home from the front, he ended up sitting behind a desk, tracking the profiteers

who were siphoning money away from the war effort. Now he was facing the task of sifting through the confessions and leads regarding Lincoln's murder. He would only be a part of the investigation for a short time and returned to New York soon afterward, but he wasn't done investigating frauds. His keen eye for detail might have made him the right man to follow a paper trail for the Secret Service, but he was also a veteran mesmerist from his younger days.

It was a skill that made him the perfect candidate for a job in the eighteen seventies when a newspaper sent him north to investigate something unusual, and it would be a case that would draw him back into the world of the occult. A story will pick up again later as Alcott and the Pinkerton's investigated Lincoln's murder. There were bodyguards assigned to stay with Mary Lincoln in the

midst of her raw suffering. One of those bodyguards later wrote women spiritualists in some way gained access to her and poured into her ear pretend messages from her dead husband. But now she was so weakened, he said that she wasn't able to resist the cruel cheat. The sittings nearly drove her mad. At least that was her son Robert's opinion.

He threw the spiritualists out of the house. He hated their beliefs with a passion, and must have always been disgusted by his mother's attempts to talk to his dead brothers. In the following days, he went so far as to have his grieving mother committed to an insane asylum. Of course, Mary wasn't the only one to carry on speaking with the spirit of Lincoln after he died, But then again, she wasn't the only one grieving either. She kept a

shrine in her closet. Maggie's period of hopeless morning, alongside her descent into desperate poverty, had started before the war with Elisha Kine's death. The chaos of the Civil War had done nothing to lift her spirits either. Every day she would step into her closet and pull back a set of black drapes. There sat an engraving of Elisha's face, surrounded by his gifts to her, the jewels, the handkerchiefs, the letters, even a map that showed his route of

his journey north. But despite her work as a medium, Maggie had no map or chart that traced his journey into death. So she would light a candle in his memory and weep for him as long as she could stand it. When she couldn't stand it anymore, she would drink Brandy was Maggie's companion during the dark years of the Civil War. As her long legal battles with Elisha's relative have stretched on. They never relented either. The Canes never acknowledged his relationship with her, let alone that she

was his wife. But in the midst of her grief, Maggie did make friends who were willing to find her help. They initiated a lawsuit against the Canes, arguing that Maggie was entitled to at least half of a licious estate. It didn't bring any kind of a swift resolution, though, and it added another layer to the quarrel that had

already dragged on for years. Here's author Nancy Stewart. Now the lawsuit takes place in yes where Philadelphia, of course, where he's from, and his father had been a district court judge. And the family keeps making these bargains as they don't want anyone to know he was married to, quotes the Rapper. Then they'll provide for her for a nuity out of this five thousand dollars and as a

struggle that goes on for a long long time. In her boldest gambit, Maggie worked with an author to write a book that told the story of her relationship with Elisha, including one hundred and thirty four of their letters. When the manuscript was sent to the printer, Elisha's brother suddenly appeared and offered to pay her off with two thousand dollars, as well as smaller quarterly payments drawn from the mysterious trust that Elisha had established. When Maggie agreed, she received

the first quarterly payment, but the rest never came. During the war, Kate was the only medium of the three Fox sisters who was still holding public seances, Maggie was submerged in her personal battles, and Leah was floating above the fray in her newcastle. So as Maggie descended further into the darkness of alcoholism, Kate extended her earnings to her sister and supported both of them. But it wasn't

just Maggie who was drinking. Here's more from Nancy Stewart. Maggie, in midst her breakdowns and so on, after Elisha's death, finally actually becomes a Catholic, which is interesting. She does drinking more and more, and by the way, her sister has become quite a famous and now beautiful, lovely young woman also is drinking. The two of them are drinking, and there are various efforts to put them on the wagon, so to speak. Maggie's case eventually went back to the courts.

When Confederate forces were nearing the Canes estates outside Philadelphia just before the Battle of Gettysburg, he gave the Canes more excuses to avoid court dates and payments. Elisha had been dead for seven years at that point, and yet she continued to fight and to drink as well. One night in December of eighteen sixty four, the sister's old friend, Horace Greeley, who long advocated temperance in his newspapers, found

Maggie wandering drunkenly in the snowy New York street. A biography published in the nineteen forties recorded that when Horace asked her what she was doing, she replied, I'm looking for Elisha. He is somewhere in this awful storm. I always find him in the snow. When he led her home, Horace found that Kate was also wrapped in an alcohol addiction. He put his head together with Leah and the rest of their family, and they decided to pay for the sisters to begin a course at a small hospital nearby

called the Swedish Movement Cure Hospital. The founders there practiced one of the many new attempts at medical treatment that had sprung up alongside magnetic healing. Here's Nancy Stewarts once again. Now the Swedish Movement. It was one of those many And there were many health reform movements going on at that point of the beginning of the sanitarium movements, or at least the acceleration of them, and water cures and diet cures were very popular in the mid nine century.

But anyway, yes, so the Swedish Movement Cure was run by this doctor George Taylor and his wife Sarah in New York City end they care for Katie and they try to keep her sober. The tailor's work focused on a combination of massage and other techniques for releasing nervous tension in the body. But even as they worked on Kate, she worked on them as well. Soon they were calling

her powers of mediumship extraordinary. While Kate was sitting for their cures, they were sitting for her seances, still clinging to her dark path. Though Maggie refused both, She was single minded in her fight with the Canes. That is until the summer of eighteen sixty five, when her case was finally decided. The Philadelphia court, where Elisha's family was deeply involved, came down on the side of the Canes by throwing out the case altogether. It was the last

thing Maggie and her family needed to hear. In January of that year, the Fox sisters had lost their father, then in August their mother had passed away. As you might imagine, it was difficult for Maggie to find light in those dark times, but she did brighten a bit when her book finally reached Prince. At least now people could read The Love Life of Dr Kane and know

her side of the story. Leah and Daniel Underhill even decided to fund an apartment for their sisters just a few blocks away from the Movement Cure Hospital so that Kate and Maggie could stay together, and it seemed that maybe things were starting to look up. But when Leah visited her sisters one morning that summer, she found them

in the midst of a disastrous relapse. Not only had Maggie resumed holding seances with Kate, finally throwing aside the religious obedience that had restrained her for so long, but the pair were also consumed with the destructive spirit of Brandy. Leah exploded in anger at her sisters. The resulting fight one where disappointments and resentments were laid bare permanently severed. The bond between Leah and Maggie and Kate didn't fare

any better either. Her journey from recovery at the hospital to relapse with Maggie, and then back to the hospital again would play on repeat for years to come. But there was something familiar about their struggles. While the Fox family wrestled with their own demons and failures, an entire nation was doing the same, and all of them seemed to be focused on the same three things, promises, betrayal, and reconciliation. The nation had been reunited, but it was

hardly unified. For some, spirit of liberation, like the figure of Lincoln was what they needed to lift their downcast eyes. For others, the loss was far more personal and raw. They grieved dead sons, nephews, brothers, fathers, and friends. The war had left many wounds, both the personal and the political. As it was before the war, the social obligation to mourn publicly seemed to fall on white, middle class women.

There were expectations about how a grieving woman with some social clout and some money to her name should act. At the same time, the whole idea of what a woman's sphere ought to be was continually changing. Thousands of families, but especially women, were looking for some kind of guidance to bring peace to their hearts, and many found that

in spiritualism. So it was only natural that when the scale of death became unbelievable, it became more and more possible to see a life beyond death as a reality. Too many, the spiritualist slogan there is no Death was a welcome relief. One writer in eighteen sixty seven noted with surprise that rather than shattering spiritualism and its optimism for a better world, the number of spiritualists was growing with each passing day. He wrote, Mothers are losing their

children by death. Fond fathers unwillingly give up their only son of their name to the grave. Each day, how many die, some of whom are long and some of whom are bitterly mourned by the survivors, mourned with blind longing and passionate pain. And this being so, it is vain to look for a speedy ending to a belief that offers the living one more opportunity to speak with

the beloved dead. In fact, the desire was so strong that the spiritualist newspapers started publishing a new kind of advertisement. In the years before the war, their pages were full of notices from mediums offering their services to anyone who wanted them. In the years after the war, though, we started to see the reverse letters from grieving families who wanted help contacting those they've lost. Here's historian Molly McGarry

the spiritualist press. I think that the Schekna is one of the first spirituals public patients to include pages of letters from readers to the editor man in Samuel Britten asking for comfort, asking for consolation, and sometimes asking for assistance in contacting dead loved ones. So their letters of mourning, their letters of loss, and there's sometimes letters asking for

help and making his connections. For mediums like Victoria Woodhall, who had established themselves as spiritual healers, relieving the pain of wounds opened by massive violence was business and a lucrative one. When Victoria returned from San Francisco to Ohio in the years before the war and reunited with her sister and mother, she was also pulled back into the surreal world of perpetual cons and frauds that her father,

Buck Claflin, built around his family. She and her sister Tenny were selling their services as mediums for the cure of disease, but as far as Victoria could see, there was a big difference between her approach and what her father wanted. She laid of wrote, I believe that Tenny ought to use the gift God has given her, but not in the mercenary way. She was forced to use it, and it's easy to understand what she meant. Mary Gabriel writes that Claflin crew picked the bones of the border

states after waves of violence from the war. They sold hope to the hopeless so often that even though Victoria had come back from the West to be with them, she couldn't always stand to be around them for long, which is why Victoria wasn't with her family for one of their most egregious crimes. That was when Buck arrived in Ottawa, Illinois, not far from where I grew up in fact, and announced himself as Dr. RB Claflin, King of Cancers. He rented out the entire Fox River House,

the town's oldest hotel, to establish an infirmary there. Buck and Tenny dosed patients with their classic life elixir, just as they've done before, but of course it did nothing for their dying victims. In fact, the mixture of sheep's fats, lie and perfumes actually deepened their suffering. Once, when Victoria came to visit her family, she heard the screams of a patient and examine their wounds under the bedclothes. She saw ragged flesh dissolved away from limbs covered in blood

and puss. They were essentially being chemically melted by Buck's poisons. When Victoria confronted him about what he was doing, he said, there are only three cures for cancer. Cut it out, poison it with arsenic or burn it out, and I burn it. Despite the horrors of the life elixir that Bucks sold in her name, stories of Tenny's ability to diagnose wounds, cure illnesses, and even relay the details of how they occurred continued to be spread by local newspapers.

As Ever, the claim was that the spirits poured their power through the young woman. Bucks advertisements made it clear that Tenny was the only one who administered the elixir, which is why when their patient died in June of eighteen sixty four, word reached the Claflands that it was Tenny who would face charges for manslaughter. It wasn't the first time the law came down on Buck, and he knew how to slip away from the consequences of a

serious crime. Before the authorities could arrive, he bundled the family back onto the road and fled towards the horizon. They were headed east towards Cincinnati, but Victoria was about to face her own challenges to the west. In the city of St. Louis. In fact, her life was about to change forever. Whatever power was inside Victoria, it could defeat death. She had seen it save her own son.

As she told the story, there was a day when Victoria had left her son, Byron, with his father, but when she came home, she found that Canning had vanished from the house. In his place, she found her mother there, deeply upset. She told Victoria that Byron had suffered a sudden, intense fever. It had burned the boy up from the inside and killed him two hours before Victoria came home. Victoria remembered screaming, I will not permit his death. But then she grabbed Byron and held him in her arms,

and then she fell into a trance. The ceiling of the room disappeared from view, she later wrote, and the form of the Savior descended. Victoria and her son were frozen in place for seven hours. When she finally came back to herself, Byron was breathing again. Whatever disease had pulled him into death and had given him up again. From that day on, Victoria said she was convinced that divine favor was on her side. A divine power that could work through her to heal and comfort others with

hopeless wounds. If she could heal where others could only despair, then it was her responsibility to share those gifts with others. And it was the trail of that healing work that brought her to St. Louis. Here's author Mary Gabrielle So. In the years after the civil or, Victoria was found herself in St. Louis at one period, which was a really interesting place for her to be because it was kind of a hub of spiritualism, but it was also

a hub of radicalism. There were a lot of German immigrants, and one of the things that happened after was that a lot of the people who fled the conflicts in Europe landed in the United States, and a lot of the German radicals surprisingly went to St. Louis. So Victoria found herself in this kind of stew of people who were engaged in spiritualism but also political reform, and she got her first kind of introduction to revolutionary politics there.

But at Victoria had started to absorb the attitudes of liberation, they took on a less abstract face. When a charming man with a military bearing and piercing black eyes walked into the hotel room where she was holding seances. From the moment they met, it was clear that he had everything Victoria's husband, Canning lacked. His name was James Harvey Blood.

At just twenty nine, he was an ambitious man. He was the city auditor, the president of the St. Louis Railroad, and the founding secretary of the St. Louis Society of Spiritualists. Victoria would soon learn just how well connected James was too. He came from an old family whose history on American soil ran back to a Massachusetts landing in sixteen seventeen, and in the previous decade his St. Louis circle had hosted the most prominent spiritualists in the nation, including Emma Harding,

Cora Hatch, and Andrew Jackson Davis. But she learned that his beautiful body carried the scars of bullet wounds that would plague him for the rest of his life. His stepson would later say that he saw five scars on james body, although his military record only mentioned one, and ever since returning from the war, James had suffered from intense headaches, shooting pain in his chest, and partial paralysis in one arm from the mini ball that had burrowed

into his left shoulder. Over time, James would learn Victoria's story as well, but he knew from their first meeting that he had found a great talent, as he wrote, and in him, Victoria had finally met her match. By the end of their first seance, the spirit spoke through Victoria and told James Harvey Blood that the two of them were going to get married. The trouble was they were both already married to other people, and they both

had children. But many spiritualists believed that everyone had natural mates and sympathetic souls waiting for them, and that those spiritual affinities mattered much more than any other kind of agreement, personal, legal, or otherwise. And then there was Victoria's view that marriage was little more than a prison. Here's Mary Gabriel once again. She thought that all social problems were rooted in bad marriages,

and so Blood. Luckily for Victoria, who probably blood was probably kind of swept away by her as she was by him, left the room and agreed it was. In a very short time they had each left their respective spouses and went traveling together in a caravan which was basically kind of a getting to know each other trip. Following the spirit's encouragement, Victoria and James discovered they were a match made in heaven, so they continued Victoria's trade

as a traveling medium, adding James to the mix. His spirits, though spoken, the voice of reform, just as they had to sojourn her truth Amy Post and the Sir Harmonique in New Orleans. One writer called him an extreme radical of the most uncompromising type. He was a zealous advocate of women's rights, abolition, and labor reform. She worked as a spiritualist, but it was it was a completely different

environment from anything she had experienced before. There was a freedom to their relationship and an intellectual change that she had never had with anyone. And I think that this was the moment when Victoria Woodhall as we came to know her, as as the world came to know her, was born and and actually Blood was her first teacher. When Victoria stepped out with James Blood, she was still calling herself a healer, and this time it was maybe more true than at any other point in the past

five years. Without her father's schemes, placebos and outright poisons rattling on the margins of every seance. Victoria was able to give her full attention to her clients and the spirits, and those clients paid for nothing but her time, her words, and her sympathetic ear. From our vantage point today, it's easy to see her work as something like psychotherapy. But while the physical wounds of war were terrible, Victoria was most haunted by the stories she heard from women whose

lives sounded so much like her own. Victoria would go on to spend the coming decades writing down accounts of abuse of marriages and terrorized wise women who hated their husbands but were forced into sex and motherhood. They didn't want young women who were abandoned to fend for themselves, And in all these dark mirrors Victoria saw the suffering of her own life reflected back. Perhaps that's why it didn't take much encouragement from James for Victoria to turn

her talents away from personal consultations. She had started thinking about how a larger platform as a spiritualist might give her the chance to fight for the rights of all women. As a former army officer, James could see it too. The fight for reform would indeed be a battle necessary but difficult, and Victoria, he believed, would lead the charge. Sojourner Truth didn't need introductions. The fight for liberation had

and her life's work for decades. In eighteen sixty two, she had returned home to Michigan after a brutal tour through Indiana in which her rallies for abolition were opposed at every step by increasingly vigorous mobs. But at the age of sixty five, the tour had taken its toll, and she was spent. By the end of the year, she was dangerously ill, and worrying about the possible outcomes of the war left her in a constant state of anxiety.

She knew the stakes, of course, she had spent her life in a spiritual battle that had now crossed over into the world of flesh and blood. Her family and friends feared that she would die before the end of the year. In the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation in January of eighteen sixty three, some of Sojourners friends, especially among the Quakers, started a campaign of support for her.

Letters and packages started to arrive at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, Some from as far away as Ireland. The encouragement brought by the Emancipation Nation was a wind under her wings. As she rallied out of her sickness, Sojourner began to send her own gifts in return. Cards with her photograph were mailed to people who would otherwise never have the chance to meet her face to face.

But the Emancipation Proclamation was also met with a fierce backlash, including waves of violence in Detroit that targeted the city's black community and well known abolitionists. In response, Sojourner's grandson, James, joined up with two sons of Frederick Douglas, along with many other young men, to join the First Northern Black Regiment. Newspapers that had previously reported on Sojourner and Truth were now also including stories about Harriet Tubman and other black abolitionists.

But if this newfound interest among white media raised sojourners spirits, word that James had been lost in combat would have dashed them to pieces. And then there were the reports that racist violence was devastating the black community in New York City, in the very same neighbor hood where Sojourner had once lived and worked. Some city leaders had shifted from calls for a secession to outrighte permission for white people to attack their black neighbors. So Journer knew that

she needed to get back in the fight. She gathered her strength and left Michigan behind, taking to the road again. Despite her recent illness about that journey, she wrote, I mean to live till I am a hundred years old if it please God, and see my people all free, rather than join a black regiment. Though she set out in eighteen sixty four for Washington. On the way, she stopped in Rochester and stayed with Amy and Isaac post.

Amy organized the lecture during her visit, and Sojourner and Frederick Douglas spoke together from the same platform once again. When she reached the capital, Sojourner met Lincoln and spoke in churches throughout the city. Before she traveled to the refugee camps. She found that the people who had freed themselves from captivity and come north were now subject to the whims of employers who would all for them jobs but then refused to pay. When they weren't fighting bad bosses,

they were taking government projects that paid months late. So so a journal came up with a plan. She started writing to Amy Post to coordinate deliveries of clothes, betting, and medicine to the Freedman's Village and asked for Amy to send back word for opportunities for schooling and jobs across her network. Here's historian Margaret Washington. She was a counselor Freedman's Village for about a year and a half and that was important. That was when Freedman's Village they

built homes. Sojourn her truth set up a church. She asked people congressmen to come when they had celebrations, and they would they would come and uh and see the progress that the freed people were making. In fact, Sojourner received an official appointment as counselor to the freed people at Freedman's Village when it was established on land that

had been part of Robert Elise Arlington estate. She stayed there until eighteen sixty five, when bills forming the Freedman's Bureau and the Freedman Savings Bank seemed to secure the new status of freedom for black Americans. Here's Margaret Washington once again. So she stayed there for a year and a half and then she went to help with Josephine in the city in Washington City. I think that's where she really thrived because she taught sewing and other domestic

arts to the women. Then she went to Freedman's Hospital and worked at Freedman's Hospital, which was going to become Howard University's medical school. She did that for a year and a half. At the same time she is along with Josephine, setting up this employment office. I just found that was that was just so fascinating. All that while she stayed in touch with her network of spiritualist friends, Man continued to work together with a Post. Amy and Isaac,

for their part, kept their arms open in Rochester. So in eighteen sixty six, when Sojourner traveled with over one forty freed people to western New York, Amy and the community in Rochester were waiting for them, and she was occasionally joined at the Relief Association headquarters by other spiritualists who traveled to Washington to assist in the work in the years after the Civil War that included Cora Hatch.

In fact, her mutual friendship with Amy Post was only one of the connections that formed a bond between her and Sojourner truth. They met in the eighteen fifties. In the book, I talked about this abolitionist singing group, the Hutchinson's. The Hutchinsons were the most popular folk singers in America, but they were also radical abolitionists. They were good friends of Sojourners. They spent a lot of time at Northampton. There's one abbey. Abbey was a spiritualist, and Abby had

Cora Hatch at her house a lot. Cora and so Journer met at Abby Hudginson's home. They met there several times that I've found because when so Journer was after she got well and she said, I'm determined to go to Washington and see the freedom of my people. She stayed with Abby Hutchinson and Cora was also there. Then Cora went to Washington until Journer was there. While she worked alongside so Journer in Washington, Cora also stayed in

touch with Amy Post. She wrote a letter to Rochester saying that important things are happening here at the Freedman's Village, laboring together to bring a new world into being. Both women would eventually move from the Freedman's Hospital to the black churches growing around Washington, and in doing so they would weave together the ultimate spiritualist vision, making the world new again. A familiar figure stepped onto the New Orleans docks. She had once been Cora Scott, and then for a

long while Cora Hatch. All along she had won praise for her beautiful curls and the power and intellect of the spirits who spoke through her. Now, in May of eighteen sixty seven, she was Cora Daniels. No longer the little girl from Wisconsin, or even the unfortunate young wife of a selfish promoter. Cora now stood in New Orleans

as the wife of Nathan W. Daniels. He was the man who had served as the commanding officer for the Louisiana Native Guards during the war before being discharged for defending them against racist white officers, and he'd sat for seances with Henri and the members of his Sir Carmonique when he returned to the North. Nathan was among those spiritualists who had been invited to the White House to attend a seance with Mary Lincoln, even though he had

never met the president. But it was all worth it because he met someone better, a beautiful spiritualist medium who was working with her friends to build the world of

radical equality that the spirits cried out for Cora. Their record of sciences held during their time in Washington shows just how close Cora had become to the capital's spiritualists, including Neddie Colburn, Giles Stebbins, who had been converted by sojourn or truth at Northampton, and a nurse named Clara Barton, whose experiences during the war would lead her to create the American Red Cross. When Cora and Nathan arrived in

New Orleans, they carried new life with them. Their infant daughter, Henrietta, and Nathan had been appointed to a government post in the city. Together, they believed they would bring hope to a place Nathan loved. He was eager to do some good. Just like James Blood, Nathan was a man ready to put his courage and vigor toward the cause of rebuild holding a just and equitable society, this time with his

wife and daughter beside him. Cora spent most of her time caring for Henrietta, but her experience as a spiritualist and connection to the former members of the Native Guard eventually earned her an invitation to speak. In response, she set pen to paper to write a memorial poem. It was meant to be a spirit inspired accompaniment for the ringing of funeral bells, a harsh reality for so many

people after the war. But those funeral bells would soon be ringing much louder than she expected, louder and far too close to home. 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. If the early seances portrayed Native spirits as guides and healers for white spiritualists, the tone changed as reports of more violence reached seance circles in the East.

When murdered leaders arrived to speak at seance tables. During the reports of genocide and dispossession of the eighteen sixties and seventies, Indian blessings on spiritualists were replaced by Indian curses, curses on a nation whose soldiers and citizens had murdered them. But as other newspapers fell in line with the white supremacist rhetoric of writers who pushed the idea of manifest destiny, the Banner of Light continued to print criticisms of that message.

It was their responsibility to heed the voices of the spirits, after all, and report their messages to the reading public. Something was happening. Spiritualists who had viewed slavery as a sin that left a stain on the nation had begun to see America's westward advancement into the territory of the Native Americans as just more of the same. Their editorials called u S policy a fraud and a swindle at a time when few other voices would. As violence piled

on violence. Cora and the radical politicians who heeded her spirits were sure that this was just one more way that the nation needed to be knocked down and made new again. But to take those stains away, they needed more than hope. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane

in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man, Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians. Source materi a real 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 Menkey.

For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.