Speaking with the Dead in Early America - Penn Press

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SPEAKING with the DEAD in EAR LY A MER ­I­C A

Erik R. Seeman

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

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contents

Introduction. Speaking with the Dead

1

Chapter 1. The Transatlantic Science of the Dead

11

Chapter 2. Elegy in Puritan New ­England

42

Chapter 3. Talking Gravestones and Visions of Heaven

73

Chapter 4. Voices of the Dead in the American Enlightenment

104

Chapter 5. Eighteenth-­Century Imaginative Lit­er­a­ture

130

Chapter 6. Revelations and New Denominations

159

Chapter 7. Religious Objects, Sacred Space, and the Cult of the Dead

189

Chapter 8. Ghosts, Guardian Angels, and Departed Spirits

229

Conclusion. Continuing Relationships

263

Notes 273 Index 000 Acknowl­edgments

321

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Introduction

Speaking with the Dead

Woodbridge, New Jersey, September 2016. The First Presbyterian Church is straight out of Central Casting: white brick, Greek Revival pediment, soaring steeple piercing the steel-­gray sky. At the front of the sanctuary my grand­ father, Ernest Barany, is sealed inside a gunmetal casket, its color recalling the U.S.S. Becuna he served on in World War II. ­Because my grand­father was active in this church for de­cades the place is full, and b­ ecause he lived well for ninety-­one years the eulogists adopt a tone of fond reminiscence rather than unspeakable loss. One man shares stories from the days when Ernie was the star ­running back on the high school team, known to every­one as “The Ghost” for the way he floated across the field, eluding all tacklers. The youn­ gest eulogist, my twenty-­something cousin Katie Rose Barany, rises to speak.

“I ­didn’t ­really plan anything, but I want to share something with you. I’m a millennial, so it’s on my phone.” She explains that when she used to go to Bible camp ­every summer, Ernie never forgot to call on her birthday. One time he left a voice mail, and she has kept it over the years, transferring it from phone to phone. She swipes a few times. “Let’s see if this works.” She holds the phone up to the mic. “Hi, Katie, this is Grandpa.” The audience gasps. “We want to wish you a very, very happy birthday. And we hope to see you when you get back, I’m sorry we missed you now, okay?”1 Dozens of tissues rustle. We ­weren’t expecting to hear Ernie speak t­ oday.

Watervliet, New York, spring 1843. The young Shaker ­woman lies peacefully on a bier. F ­ amily members and friends gaze upon the corpse, praying and singing as they say their final farewells. The ser­vice, held in the ­family’s ­house and marked by religion, sentiment, and attention to the dead body, could be the funeral of any white Protestant in antebellum Amer­i­ca. ­Until, that is, one of the female Shakers standing next to the corpse suddenly becomes

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“as it ­were entranced, and announce[s] herself to be the Spirit of the departed one,” in the words of a sympathetic outside observer. Adopting “a voice sweetly modulated,” the visionist comforts the gathered mourners. The deceased w ­ oman tells her loved ones that they too can expect to go to heaven when they die.

“When the time comes for you to cast off the perishable clay,” she says, “your freed spirit ­will fly to realms of bliss.” She also brings a more startling message: “I am not dead.” She elaborates that “though my spirit is released from the cold and inanimate clay which lies ­there, and which it lately inhabited, I am ­ ill remain a presence still in your midst.” Her spirit, to every­one’s delight, w 2 among the living.

Dorchester, Mas­sa­chu­setts, January 1668. Mourners stand in the graveyard, near the ­simple meeting­house that dominates the town’s public life, and gather around Lydia Minot’s closed coffin. The thirty-­seven-­year-­old ­woman has recently died delivering her sixth child. Minot’s husband, c­ hildren, minister, and many ­others prepare to watch the sexton lower the coffin into the hole he has prepared. But first, someone unfolds a sheet of paper and reads an elegy. Puritans worry that a funeral sermon might seem too much like a Catholic Mass for the dead, but they consider a poem an appropriate way to pay tribute to the deceased and inculcate piety among the bereaved. Standing in close proximity to the corpse, the speaker offers eigh­teen lines of Minot’s ­imagined words from heaven, which reveal tantalizing details about the afterlife: “New Robes I have, new Com­pany, new Skill / To sing th’new Song.”3 She is wearing new garments, among new friends, singing the song to the Lord that Psalm 96 describes. The mourners’ Calvinist faith tells them they c­ an’t be sure Minot is in heaven, but on this day they choose to overlook that, reassured by Minot’s ­imagined voice.

Three funerals across more than three centuries, among three religious groups that trace their lineage back to the Protestant Reformation. The dead speak in all three. But ­wasn’t the Reformation supposed to end communication between the living and dead?

It turns out the answer to that question is more complicated than historians have realized. Yes, the Protestant Reformation dramatically reconceived the relationship between the living and dead. In late medieval Catholicism, mourners employed an array of practices to maintain connections with the deceased. Crucial to this was belief in purgatory, a m ­ iddle place between heaven and hell, where the vast majority of souls went to experience purgation—­ cleansing by fire—­before ascending to heaven. While in purgatory, souls could be helped by the actions of the living: saying prayers, paying for Masses,

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endowing chantries where priests did the praying. The living could also maintain relationships with saints—­the “very special dead,” in one historian’s phrase—by praying to them, sometimes aided by proximity to the saints’ bodily remains, and asking the dead to intercede with Christ on the petitioner’s behalf.4 In the early sixteenth c­ entury, the Reformation abolished purgatory and the veneration of saints. Protestants could no longer help their loved ones’ souls in the afterlife and they could no longer enlist the aid of the very special dead.

As one recent, comprehensive history of the Reformation puts it, “Protestantism stripped religion of mediation and intimacy with the dead.”5 At least in theory. In practice, Protestants proved not quite so willing to abandon the relationships with the dead to which they had long been accustomed. The dead, for example, continued to return as ghosts: not just right ­after the Reformation but in all three centuries this book covers. The theology of ghosts changed—­for Protestants, they could no longer be souls returned from purgatory—­but ghosts remained a way that laypeople and ministers continued to imagine interacting with the dead. But whereas some ­people believed their ghost sightings w ­ ere real, other ways of thinking about the dead ­were understood to be in the realm of imagination. When p ­ eople wrote poems that portrayed the dead speaking, or sang songs addressed to the dead, or spoke to portraits of their deceased loved ones, they did not think they ­were actually communicating with the dead. Nonetheless, Protestants eagerly interacted with the dead through imaginative lit­er­a­ture and material culture ­because ­doing so fulfilled their desires to continue thinking about their loved ones. This was how the living maintained some aspects of the relationships they had shared with ­people now dead.6 Thus it is impor­tant to pay attention to the differences among the three funerals that open this book. All three involved the speaking dead, but only in the Shaker funeral did participants think the deceased was actually communicating with them. When Lydia Minot’s f­ amily members listened to the poet ventriloquize her, they did not think the elegist was privy to some divine communication. Nor ­were my f­ amily members confused by the source of my grand­father’s voice; we ­didn’t think he was actually talking to us. But my experience of that moment’s power—­the sobs it elicited from me and ­others—­leads me, in an act of historical empathy, to infer that the puritans who gathered around Minot’s coffin felt a connection with her when the poet spoke in her voice. You d ­ on’t need to take my word for it, though. My in­for­mants ­will repeatedly attest, through their actions and writings, that communication

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with the dead was deeply meaningful, even when it was understood to be ­imagined.

I discovered this neglected aspect of Protestant belief and practice—­this desire for continuing relations with the dead—­when I tried to answer what I thought was a straightforward question: Where did séance Spiritualism come from? Or more precisely, How did Spiritualism gain so many adherents so quickly? I had long been struck by how both historians and contemporaries portray Spiritualism as exploding like a supernova in the 1850s, seemingly without warning. ­A fter the Fox S­ isters of Hydesville, New York, began to interpret the rappings of a spirit in 1848, and especially ­after they demonstrated their super­natural talents on stage in New York City two years l­ater, legions of Americans tried to communicate with deceased loved ones. As the New York ­lawyer George Templeton Strong wrote in 1855, “What would I have said six years ago to anybody who predicted that before the enlightened nineteenth ­century was ended hundreds of thousands of ­people in this country would believe themselves able to communicate with the ghosts of their grand­fathers?”7 While largely avoiding Strong’s condescension, scholars have echoed his astonishment, portraying Spiritualism as a dramatic and surprising break with the past. It was a movement, according to one historian’s estimate, that had millions of followers within a de­cade of its founding.8 Even if Spiritualists exaggerated about “millions” of adherents, this seemed a question worthy of investigation. How does a new religion go from zero to many hundreds of thousands of participants in less than a de­cade? So I began this book as a “prehistory” of Spiritualism, looking for its roots in American culture. I soon became dissatisfied with the answers that historians have offered. Confining themselves largely to the two or three de­cades before 1848, most scholars point to a short list of antecedents: Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic who spoke with angels; the Shakers and their practice of spirit communication; the American incarnation of Mesmerism, which emerged in the late 1830s; and the trance healer Andrew Jackson Davis, the “Poughkeepsie Seer,” who gained widespread notoriety in the late 1840s.9 ­These sources all undoubtedly helped pave the way for Spiritualism; they all promoted communication between this world and heaven; all ­will receive their due in Speaking with the Dead. But could such marginal sources r­ eally explain Spiritualism’s broad appeal? As late as 1840, the Swedenborgian New Church in Amer­i­ca claimed only 850 members. Th ­ ere w ­ ere a few thousand Shakers, a handful of Mesmerist magazines, and (to the relief of many) only one Poughkeepsie Seer. In fact, for Shakers and other new denominations the

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influence actually ran in the opposite direction: rather than teaching mainstream Protestants how to speak with the dead, Shakers and Mormons and Swedenborgians built on the preexisting interest in maintaining relationships with the dead.

The more I looked, the more I found that communication with the dead appeared in virtually ­every genre of source I examined. For the nineteenth ­century, I found the practice represented in parlor songs, funeral hymns, letters, diaries, and sentimental poems. I turned to ­earlier sources and found speaking with the dead in elegies and epitaphs, newspapers and witchcraft narratives, sermons and ghost stories and plays. I found writers spanning the full social and educational spectrum, from minister-­scientists such as Cotton Mather and Joseph Glanvill to the ­humble ­women and men whose heavenly visions filled broadsides on both sides of the Atlantic.

By the time I traced the phenomenon back to the En­glish Reformation, I realized I was no longer writing a prehistory of Spiritualism. Speaking with the dead was so vari­ous in its manifestations, so diverse in its goals and audiences, that I could no longer say that all of its expressions ­were “leading to” ­ omen Spiritualism. Such teleology did a disser­vice to the sources and the w and men who wrote them. At that point the book assumed its current form: a history of Protestant communication with the dead before the advent of Spiritualism.10 This intellectual trajectory helps explain the book’s thematic and geo­ graph­i­cal limits. The title claims Speaking with the Dead ­will cover “Amer­ i­ca,” but that exaggerates. The book focuses on ­people of Eu­ro­pean descent.

African Americans and Amerindians had their own traditions of spirit communication, but they deserve separate treatment. And in researching two previous books, I did not find significant Amerindian or African influences on Euro-­A merican communication with the dead.11 Moreover, Euro-­A merican postmortem communication is the more surprising story, given how historians have long written about Protestantism as a religion that does not allow interaction with the dead. Fi­nally, to provide coherence and allow for an in-­ depth examination of sources, the book starts within the relatively narrow compass of New E ­ ngland and then broadens to include the northern colonies and states.

Speaking with the Dead begins with ghost belief in the sixteenth c­ entury.

Protestant ministers and laypeople alike believed in apparitions of the dead, though ministers—­actively involved in a campaign against purgatory, the source of Catholic ghosts—­insisted that most ghosts ­were demonic delusions:

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apparitions sent by Satanic minions to tempt the unwary into sin. Most laypeople ­were not so deeply invested in the exact ontological status of a given apparition. If it looked like someone they knew, they assumed it was that person’s soul returned from heaven. Starting in the late seventeenth c­ entury and gaining speed in the eigh­teenth, ghost belief gradually diminished, especially among ministers and educated laypeople. Most members of the literati continued to assert that God had the power to send souls back to earth, but they believed God rarely did so. Almost all ghost sightings, elites increasingly insisted, ­were the result of credulous ­people being fooled by a shadow, or a dream, or a guilty conscience. For their part, laypeople in the eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries held a wide range of views, from belief to skepticism and ­every point in between. To be clear, this is not a linear narrative of the “disenchantment” of the West, to use the German sociologist Max Weber’s highly contested term. Instead, ghost belief persisted, transformed, and even gained key elite adherents, all against a background of gradual decline.12 Indeed, one of my key findings is the surprising per­sis­tence of serious, unironic ghost reports in American newspapers through the first half of the nineteenth c­ entury.

This story of decreasing ghost belief among the educated is familiar to historians. My narrative breaks new ground, however, in weaving the history of ghost belief together with much broader, previously unexplored ways of portraying communication with the dead in imaginative lit­er­a­ture and material culture. Some elegies spoke, like Lydia Minot’s, in the deceased’s voice; ­others directly addressed the dead. ­A fter 1750, many American gravestone epitaphs likewise represented the dead as speaking or being spoken to. The mid-­ eighteenth-­century “Graveyard School” of En­glish authors explored the connection between the living and dead in verse and prose; l­ater Gothic fiction only intensified the literary focus on corpses and the returned dead. Nineteenth-­ century sentimental lit­er­a­ture—­a mainstay of American magazines, especially ­those marketed to ­women—­depicted dead c­ hildren speaking from heaven and showed cemeteries as places where the living could make contact with departed spirits. Parlor songs invited middle-­class ­women and men to voice the words of departed spirits. Portraits and photo­graphs of the dead beckoned mourners to imagine conversations with their loved ones in heaven.

All ­these forms of imaginative lit­er­a­ture and material culture responded to and stoked widespread interest in the relationship between the living and dead, what the En­glish clergyman Isaac Watts referred to as p ­ eople’s “Curiosity” about “the Circumstances of our pious Friends departed.”13 Do the dead ­ e’re ­doing? Can they protect us from evil? Do they take an interest in what w

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ever return to earth? Imaginative lit­er­a­ture and material culture never claimed to answer such questions definitively but rather served as a forum for ­people to explore ­those issues on their own or with a like-­minded community of readers, singers, writers, and graveyard visitors.

By the start of the nineteenth ­century, as ghost belief faded among educated Americans, a new complex of religious ideas emerged about the relationship between the living and the deceased. I call ­these beliefs a “cult of the dead,” using the religious studies definition of a “cult” as a form of veneration focused on a specific figure, such as the early Christian cult of saints or the early modern cult of the Virgin Mary.14 Ghosts no longer ­were the main way most ­people thought about interacting with the dead. Rather, participants in the cult of the dead ­imagined they ­were able to maintain postmortem relationships with their deceased loved ones. They held, in tension with three hundred years of Protestant teachings, five distinctive beliefs: bodily remains deserved adoration; the souls of the dead became angels in heaven; t­ hose souls could return to earth as guardian angels and hover around the living; cemeteries ­were locations especially well-­suited to communing with the dead; and it was legitimate to pray to the dead, addressing them in diaries using forms almost identical to prayers to God. Participants in the cult of the dead built on key Protestant tenets, including belief in an afterlife populated by the souls of the dead. But they also drew on the imaginative lit­er­a­ture and material culture of previous centuries, pushed the ideas found therein even further, expressed their ideas in published poems and short stories and mourning embroideries, and helped expand the circle of believers. A reciprocal relationship thus existed between lived religion and imaginative forms of expression.

The cult of the dead began to emerge, it is impor­tant to note, well before the Fox ­Sisters received their first super­natural message. When reports of the “Rochester Rappings” began to circulate, participants in the cult of the dead most likely responded with knowing nods. They did not need Swedenborg, or Mesmer, or A. J. Davis, or even the Fox ­Sisters to tell them that communication with the dead was pos­si­ble. They already acted on that belief in their diaries, prayers, and graveyard visits.

It is also impor­tant to point out that the large majority of participants in the cult of the dead ­were ­women. A vast, intertwined array of changes in culture and society began in the second half of the eigh­teenth c­ entury and continued in the nineteenth c­ entury among the urban and town-­dwelling ­middle classes, altering ­women’s lives in ways that would slowly filter down the social ladder and outward to rural areas. Families became smaller, and in ­those

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smaller families companionship and affection replaced patriarchal domination as the ideal of interpersonal relations. As more men worked outside the home, ­women increasingly took charge of inculcating their ­children with Christian piety. Even though Second ­Great Awakening revivalists such as Charles Finney tried to increase the number of male members in churches, ­women continued to make up a disproportionate share of churchgoers and full members. Mortality rates remained high, and ­women, as they had for centuries, continued to perform the physical ­labor of caring for the ­dying and dead; with the rise of sentimental culture, ­women increasingly bore a disproportionate share of the emotional ­labor of grieving and memorialization. This largely female culture of mourning gained widespread repre­sen­ta­tion in popu­ lar sentimental lit­er­a­ture.15 Scholars have long been aware of ­women’s deep involvement in grief work and consolation lit­er­a­ture in the nineteenth c­ entury. A previous generation was quite critical of the mourning poems and short stories that w ­ omen so eagerly wrote and read. ­These scholars insisted that consolation lit­er­a­ture, with its implication that all deceased loved ones reached heaven, lacked the “rigor” of ­earlier Calvinist beliefs. Such lit­er­a­ture was, in this view, merely “therapeutic self-­indulgence” and “determinedly nonintellectual.”16 My interpretation, by contrast, emphasizes how female authors and readers carved out a cultural space for the sincere expression of grief; even for t­ hose not actively grieving, such lit­er­a­ture created communities of readers bound by a shared culture of sentimentality.17 Female and male participants in the cult of the dead thereby constructed a new intellectual system, expressed in lit­er­a­ture, material culture, and lived religion, that focused on maintaining postmortem relationships.

In uncovering t­ hese relationships, Speaking with the Dead makes its most significant contribution by reconceiving Protestantism as a religion in which the dead are impor­tant figures. A concept formulated by the religious studies scholar Robert Orsi is pertinent h ­ ere. According to Orsi, one should think of religion not as a set of abstract beliefs but rather as “a network of relationships between heaven and earth involving ­humans of all ages and many dif­fer­ent sacred figures together.”18 Orsi’s main area of expertise is twentieth-­century Catholicism; one can readily see how a religion with Marian apparitions and prayers to St. Jude is indeed a network of relationships between heaven and earth. But Orsi contends that his definition of religion is broadly applicable beyond Catholicism, though he mostly leaves it to ­others to substantiate that claim. This is the challenge that Speaking with the Dead takes up: showing that in the three centuries ­after the Reformation, Protestantism was a religion

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that allowed room for relationships between heaven and earth beyond the ties that connected ­humans with God. To use another of Orsi’s concepts, this book maintains that Protestantism was not a religion of “absence,” as it is sometimes caricatured to be. Orsi shows that since the Reformation, many p ­ eople (not least Protestant propagandists) have insisted on a s­ imple equation: “Catholics = presence, Protestants = absence,” where “presence” refers to “all the special suprahuman beings with whom ­humans have been in relationship in dif­fer­ent times and places.”19 In other words, many ­people have maintained that Protestantism does not include the “special suprahuman beings” that are so central to Catholicism. But as the evidence in Speaking with the Dead demonstrates, that is a false and polemical understanding of lived Protestantism.

I am not the first historian to claim that Protestantism was a religion of presence (though I am among the first to use that term). Books on providentialism, miracles, ghosts, and heavenly visions in early modern ­England have demonstrated that the super­natural was an active force in Protestant lived religion.20 Classic and recent works on the religion of lay New En­glanders have shown how witchcraft, faith healing, dreams, and the influx of the Holy Spirit ­were all part of a Protestant world rich with super­natural activity.21 Moreover, histories of religion have paid attention to the ways that death ­shaped early modern Protestantism.22 What scholars have mostly overlooked, however, is the impor­tant role of the dead.23 Focusing on the relationship between the living and dead nuances our understanding of early American religion in several ways. Most fundamentally, Protestantism was a religion of presence. The dead remained a part of the imaginative landscape ­a fter the Reformation, and suprahuman beings would only increase in religious significance with the cult of the dead’s development. Other implications emerge from this most basic one. First, Protestantism was also a religion of materiality and not just the internal ac­cep­tance of a set of creeds. Broadside elegies, gravestones, mourning embroidery, locks of hair, and posthumous portraits ­were all religious objects: when ­people viewed or handled them, they w ­ ere better able to maintain relationships with suprahuman beings.24 Second, although it has been a long time since historians have claimed that puritans practiced unadulterated Calvinism, attention to the dead’s presence in elegies, dreams, and ghost narratives offers evidence that ­people almost never i­magined their loved ones in hell, despite Calvin’s estimate that only one in a hundred would reach heaven.25 Third, the history of heaven acquires a new timeline in my telling. Ministers and laypeople ­were

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interested in heavenly reunions with loved ones a full ­century ­earlier than scholars have previously known.26 And fi­nally, with the cult of the dead’s emergence, lay men and especially ­women initiated impor­tant religious changes.

In formulating new ideas about the deceased as suprahuman beings who maintained relationships with the living, participants in the cult of the dead made innovative contributions to antebellum Protestant belief and practice.

But phrasing it that way is far too abstract, as if w ­ omen and men w ­ ere chiefly concerned with shaping Protestantism. They ­were not. Mourners simply hoped to maintain some sort of connection with the departed. Sometimes they spoke to the dead, addressing a portrait of a deceased husband or praying to a dead child. Other times they i­magined the dead talking, e­ ither in a dream or in a poem. They experienced, as I did at my grand­father’s funeral, the power of speaking with the dead.

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