Talking to the Dead (24 page)

During the war, battle-torn communities witnessed slaughter on a massive and modern scale. With modern methods of embalming a new procedure, and transportation of bodies difficult to arrange, many soldiers were buried where they fell on the battlefields, rapidly and unceremoniously interred in communal graves before their corpses could breed and spread disease.

In July 1863 eight thousand soldiers died at Gettysburg in a three-day battle, corpses outnumbering the living residents of that small Pennsylvania town by more than two to one. The combined Union and Confederate casualties totaled fifty thousand, including the dead, wounded, missing, and captured. Prisoners of war, civilians, and soldiers worked together to bury bodies beneath a thin veil of earth, which protected neither the living nor the dead. The decaying corpses threatened to
contaminate soil and water; relatives and thieves disinterred the bodies in search of loved ones or valuables.

That autumn a new cemetery at Gettysburg, where the fallen could be reburied with dignity, was dedicated by Abraham Lincoln. He spoke little of the individuals who had died there, focusing instead on the “new birth of freedom” that would result from their courage and suffering.

With bodies buried in distant cemeteries, elaborate private rituals and funerals held close to home for a time seemed meaningless, at least to sorrowing families. Belief in the spirits' return, by contrast, had a compelling power for those whose relatives went off to war and never came back. Increasing numbers of the grief-stricken found solace in seances as the war continued. It's likely too that some of the men and women who attended seances were mourning not only their individual dead but also the ravaged body of the founding fathers' republic, that ideal of sovereign states bound together in harmony and by choice. The spirit of national identity that survived the war would be vastly transformed.

As Charles Livermore's meetings with Kate demonstrate, however, not every seance during these years was directly related to the war, not even in Abraham Lincoln's White House. When ten-year-old Willie Lincoln died while his father was in office, the child's mother, Mary Todd Lincoln, turned to several different mediums in Washington to help her establish contact with her son. Although she became a devout believer, there's no evidence to suggest that her husband, who attended at least one seance and permitted several to be held at the White House, experienced anything other than compassionate curiosity on his wife's behalf.

 

During the war years Maggie remained torn between fury at the Kane family, self-loathing, and conflicted rage at all things associated with Spiritualism. She wrote to a Canadian friend, the author Susanna Moodie, about “how
utterly disgusting
and
abhorrent
to refinement” Spiritualism had seemed to Kane.

“I have scarcely ten letters from Dr. Kane,” Maggie continued, “that do not tell his utter condemnation of a life as he calls Spiritualism of ‘
wickedness and Sin.
…I solemnly promised Dr. Kane at our third or
fourth meeting that I would wholly and
forever
abandon Spiritualism, with that promise I was educated and considered
as dead
to Spiritualism and Spiritualists. I have
sacredly
kept my promise from that day—and will hold it sacred until I meet him in Heaven.”
¹⁵

Maggie's relationship with the Kane family continued to deteriorate; their refusal to treat her with dignity and to acknowledge the true nature of the romance infuriated her. Finally, in 1862 she retracted her promise never to publish the love letters and threatened instead to do so. At the urging of friends, she also brought suit against the Kanes in court. Calling herself Kane's widow and adopting his last name, she used the letters to prove the explorer's love and to force a settlement. Under pressure, the Kanes agreed to give Maggie the sum of two thousand dollars plus a small ongoing annuity. In exchange she placed Kane's letters with Dr. Edward Bayard, the homeopathic physician who was treating the elderly Margaret Fox and who belonged to a family important enough to suit the Kanes.

While Maggie fought her personal battles and soldiers fought the nation's, Leah and Daniel continued to hold occasional private seances in their comfortable home, but their thoughts were never far from the Union's struggle. Emma Hardinge and Robert Dale Owen attended one sitting that went on until four in the morning. As Hardinge played war songs on the piano, Owen wrote, “a high shrill voice piped out from above our heads, ‘lower the lights.' This order was obeyed, and instantly the music was accompanied by sounds as of the marching of a heavy body of soldiers, then came repeated
EXPLOSIONS
as of the firing of musketry….”
¹⁶

Charles Livermore's sittings with Kate Fox continued through the war years, and he also kept up his correspondence with his English friend Benjamin Coleman, sending letters, pictures, even newspaper clippings. But slowly and unavoidably he found his own life changing as his firm expanded with the war effort.

“I am so engrossed by the tread mill duties of my constantly increasing business,” he wrote to Coleman, “that I cannot bring myself to the task of elaborating the details of my experience…. I can only say that the power of the manifestations which I receive has augmented rather
than diminished and that I see frequently the spirit of Dr. Franklin and of my wife as described to you—but with increased beauty and facility.”
¹⁷

In the summer of 1864 many well-known Spiritualists gathered in Chicago for the movement's First National Convention, although none of the Fox sisters attended. Perhaps not surprisingly, the event didn't go altogether smoothly. Influenced by the achievements of antislavery groups, the lecturers and writers who attended the convention, most of whom were male, tended to advocate a strong national organization with political goals achievable in this world, while mediums and trance speakers, most of them female, argued that Spiritualism's very nature necessitated a decentralized approach and otherworldly focus. On a note that surely seemed ominous to some mediums, the convention proposed a resolution stating that “American Spiritualism means something more than table-tipping and trumpet-blowing, trance-speaking, and sightseeing—that the highest conditions it imposes are not abnormal states of beatified unconsciousness…but a vigorous, healthful, working state for the practical attainment of physical and spiritual freedom, purity, and growth.” Despite controversy, the convention endorsed Lincoln for a second term.
¹⁸

Lincoln was elected in a landslide victory in the fall of 1864. In April 1865, a month after Lincoln's second inaugural, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, effectively ending the Civil War, although the official date announced as the “close of the Rebellion” was still a year away. By the war's close, one million Americans, Union and Confederate, had been wounded; more than six hundred thousand had died. The number of Civil War dead is shocking even in retrospect, higher than the number of Americans killed in battle during World Wars I and II combined.

Five days after Lee's surrender, President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. One Union veteran spoke for many when he cried, “Our country that yesterday was a scene of universal rejoicing over the return of peace, is today immersed in gloom and clothed in mourning.”
¹⁹
Lincoln's coffin was carried by train from city to city, where it was met, wrote the poet Walt Whitman, “With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night….”
²⁰
Lincoln's funeral was said to have been
modeled on that of Elisha Kent Kane, and particularly in the North and among the newly freed slaves of the South, there was an outpouring of public grief over the president's death.

 

In 1865, the year the fighting drew to a close and the country suffered the shock of Lincoln's brutal death, the Fox sisters experienced two devastating personal losses. In January frail, seventy-six-year-old John Fox passed away; in August Margaret died of typhoid fever. Having lived apart for most of their marriage, John and Margaret were buried separately as well, she in the family vault of Leah's in-laws at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, he in Arcadia, near the homes of his more conventional children, David Fox and Maria Smith.
²¹

Leah idolized her mother but at least had Daniel Underhill on whom to rely for emotional support. For Kate and Maggie, their mother's death was an event of an altogether different magnitude. Kind Margaret, her plump face wreathed in smiles, her gray head topped with her little lace cap, had been the one constant in her two youngest daughters' lives. Her spirit must have seemed insubstantial indeed compared with the comfort of her mortal, maternal self.

There was more hardship to come for the Fox sisters. The Kanes, claiming financial difficulties, halted the annuity they had agreed to pay Maggie only a few years before. Thus legally enabled to regain the love letters she had placed in trust, Maggie arranged for them to be published at last in 1866. In the book
The Love-Life of Dr. Kane
she unequivocally identified herself as her beloved Lish's widow: Margaret Fox Kane.

Whether Maggie released the letters for revenge, to prove Kane's love for her, or in the hope of some small royalty, the act failed to relieve either her financial or emotional suffering. Instead, it made her vulnerable to a new round of scathing accusations. Leah, humiliated by the reopening of the scandal as well as by Maggie's evident alcoholism, withdrew from any contact with either of her younger sisters.

Estelle Livermore last appeared to Charles Livermore through Kate Fox's mediumship in April 1866, then she returned to the Summerland—the phrase Spiritualists use to describe heaven—there to await her husband. Not long afterward Livermore retired, a very rich man who no
longer worried about his name being used in connection with Spiritualism. The days when he could be publicly shamed for his beliefs by conservative banking colleagues were over. He wrote less often to Coleman, but the two continued to correspond, and both remained helpful friends to Kate in the years to come.

Charles Livermore's letters and journal entries about the return of his Estelle were printed in Spiritualist books and journals; he regarded the sittings with Kate Fox as vital documentation of the spirit's eternal life. Reading Livermore's notes today, one finds oneself immersed in the story of a remarkable romance, although who the parties were—in reality, in memory, and in fantasy—can never be entirely clear.

 

At the end of the war New York, the city of excess, erupted in an orgy of celebration and display. Who could give the most extravagant ball, build the showiest mansion, summer at the most desirable spa, serve the most—and the most costly—champagne? It was a brand-new era, the Flash Age, when money was flaunted shamelessly as never before and stuffy respectability, at least in some circles, was only to be mocked. Henry Clews, Livermore's former partner, was one of the small coterie of men who set the pace for the razzle-dazzle.
²²

The victory of the industrialized North over the agrarian South placed immense power in the hands of captains of finance and industry such as Vanderbilt, Belmont, Gould, and Morgan, builders of railroad and banking empires. Victoria Woodhull, flamboyant medium and woman's rights advocate, made her reputation by offering astute stock tips to Vanderbilt, providing him with the sort of practical suggestions that spirits in the past had steadfastly abjured. The spirits of deceased financiers became increasingly popular at other mediums' seances, ready to dispense financial advice.

The nation, try though it might to forget, also had to come to terms with its grief over Lincoln's assassination and the hundreds of thousands who had died in the war. Loss had affected almost every home and family; concern about the afterlife was pervasive, reflected not just in politics and religion but even in popular forms of entertainment. Throughout the late 1860s audiences flocked to see plays about ghosts and spirits,
deriving some comfort from the luminous, spectral figures onstage, many of the illusions created with technology no more complex than mirrors.

Not surprisingly, Civil War monuments across the country proliferated to honor soldiers who had died; burying the dead, as it had been at the start of the century, once again became a matter of community concern and support rather than just an opportunity for expressing individual and familial grief.

Emma Hardinge wrote that the war added two million new believers to Spiritualism. If the war stirred even one friend or family member of each dead or wounded soldier to think about spirit communication, it's hardly surprising that interest grew. Over the next quarter century, estimates of the numbers of Spiritualists in the United States would range from one million to a highly inflated eleven million. Even the lower figure, however, took into account those who sympathized with the movement as well as those who identified themselves as committed Spiritualists.

The movement's growth did not necessarily predict its long-term health. The intense idealism that had characterized so much of American life before the war, the perfectionist longing for reform, was much subdued in the postwar age, and the change held true to some degree in the Spiritualist movement as well. Over the next decade disillusionment blanketed the nation. Reconstruction became a bitter struggle between those who urged swift reconciliation with the former Confederate states and those who sought justice and equality for African Americans; Congress demanded the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson; scandal pervaded the administration of his successor, Ulysses S. Grant; and mutual recriminations divided women's rights advocates from their former allies in the abolitionist movement when the vote was made available to men, whatever their race, but denied to women. The seance room increasingly became a private retreat from the realities of the outside world rather than, as it had been in the past, a gathering place for mortals actively seeking to understand the relationship between the concerns of this world and the next.