Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [31]
An 1891 memoir by a trance medium named Nettie Colburn Maynard, Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist?, stands apart from some of the era’s hackneyed literature in its vividness of style and even verisimilitude. At the end of 1862, wrote Maynard, as the Civil War passed into a second Christmas season, with hopes for peace at a dreary low, she was, at the instigation of Mary Todd Lincoln, ushered into the private quarters of the White House and asked to give a spirit reading to the exhausted commander. At the time, Lincoln had drafted but not yet signed the cornerstone measure of his presidency: the Emancipation Proclamation. There was enormous tension in the nation over when or whether he would put his signature to it.
“For more than an hour I was made to talk to him,” Maynard reported. During the course of her unconscious transmission from the spirit realm, Maynard wrote, Lincoln was assured that if he acted to sign and enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, it would be the primary achievement for which he would be remembered. As Maynard emerged from her trance, she found that a grave hush had fallen over the room. “Mr. President,” asked Congressman Daniel E. Somes of Maine, an onlooker at the séance, “would it be improper for me to inquire whether there has been any pressure brought to bear upon you to defer the enforcement of the Proclamation?” Yes, Maynard reported Lincoln saying, “It is taking all of my nerve and strength to withstand such a pressure.” Lincoln then turned to the teenage medium. “My child, you possess a very singular gift; but that it is of God, I have no doubt. I thank you for coming here tonight. It is more important than perhaps anyone present can understand.”
Whether any part of the account is true cannot be known. But it underscores a distinct and misunderstood quality among many American Spiritualists. And this was the desire to associate supernaturalism with the social good.* Here is the impulse of Andrew Jackson Davis and his vision of heaven as a place containing all of the world’s peoples; of the Shakers to whom spirits spoke of the need to end slavery and the tragedy that settlers had visited upon the Indians; and of the Freemasons and their ideal of a religious nation that eschewed sectarian division. Maynard, whatever her veracity as a witness, sought not to convince the public that she counseled Lincoln on how to conduct himself in war, how to exercise power, or how to deal with the Confederacy, but rather that, through her trance reading, she advised him to do the greatest thing a leader could do, in the eyes of social reformers.
In this way, Spiritualism was both an occult movement and a political one. It attracted the interest and participation of utopians, suffragists, and radicals, because, among other things, it provided a setting in which women—for the first time in American history—could regularly serve as religious leaders, at least of a sort. Most spirit mediums were women, with many voting-rights activists among them. Spiritualist thought-leaders included the formidable Anglo-American religious thinker Emma Hardinge Britten—an early Theosophist and political reformer who had stumped for Lincoln’s candidacy and who saw Spiritualism as the basis of a new religious order. Andrew Jackson Davis’s second wife (the seer married thrice) was the suffragette–activist Mary Fenn Love, who in 1853 coconvened the first New York State Women’s Rights Convention. “Spiritualism has inaugurated the era of woman,” Love announced.
In 1872, the Equal Rights Party, a consortium of suffragists and abolitionists, named trance-medium Victoria Woodhull the nation’s first female presidential candidate. Woodhull had gained national prominence the previous year in a historic voting-rights speech before the congressional Judiciary Committee. She was the first woman to appear before a joint committee of Congress. She later told supporters that