This Republic of Suffering [85]
Presbyterian Robert Patterson acknowledged in his Visions of Heaven for the Life on Earth, published a decade after the war, that earlier conceptions of heaven that had excluded the continuation of love and friendship were “very chilling.” The era of Victorian domesticity could not tolerate the obliteration of these cherished ties of home and family. The widespread assumption among Civil War Americans that they would one day be reunited with lost kin was fundamental to the solace of religious faith. When Harper’s Weekly published its notice of the best-selling Heaven Our Home, the aspect of the book it found most worthy of comment was that its author supported “the comforting belief of the recognition of friends in Heaven, which to him is a home, with a great, and happy and loving family in it.” Seven of the book’s chapters were specifically devoted to “Recognition of Friends in Heaven.” If soldiers needed to be assured they would not really die, survivors yearned to know their loved ones were not—even if they were missing or unknown—forever lost. “They will not leave us long,” one South Carolina woman affirmed. They were “only gone before.” Jews as well as Christians invoked these consolations. Rebecca Gratz comforted her brother Ben about his son’s death in 1861 by reassuring him “they shall be reunited in another world.” The Civil War made urgent the transformation of heaven into an eternal family reunion, encouraging notions of an afterlife that was familiar and close at hand, populated by loved ones who were just “beyond the veil.”18
Many bereaved Americans, however, were unwilling to wait until their own deaths reunited them with lost kin, and they turned eagerly to the more immediate promises of spiritualism. A series of spirit rappings in upstate New York in the late 1840s had intensified spreading interest in the apparent reality of communication between the living and the dead. To an age increasingly caught up in the notion of science as the measure of truth, spiritualism offered belief that seemed to rely on empirical evidence rather than revelation and faith. If the dead could cause tables to rise, telegraph messages from the world beyond, and even communicate in lengthy statements through spirit mediums, an afterlife clearly must exist. Here was, in the words of one popular spiritualist advocate, “proof palpable of immortality.”19
Men and women began to participate in regular spirit circles in hopes of communicating with the dead. By 1853 one spiritualist estimated that thirty such groups met regularly in the city of Philadelphia alone, and that thirty thousand mediums were operating across the country. The Spiritualist Register reported that just before the outbreak of war 240,000 inhabitants of New York State—6 percent of its total population—were spiritualists. Strongest in the Northeast, where it often attracted abolitionists, feminists, and adherents of other radical social movements, spiritualism had its southern disciples as well, an estimated 20,000 in Louisiana, for example, and 10,000 in Tennessee. In the mid-1850s South Carolina planter and politician James Henry Hammond and author William Gilmore Simms, both vigorous proslavery advocates, explored spiritualism as an alternative to what they regarded as the unconvincing tenets of revealed religion. Simms believed he had successfully communicated with his dead children, and Hammond developed a series of questions for the dead that Simms posed to a medium on a visit to New York.20
By the time war broke out, spiritualist notions were sufficiently common to influence and engage even those who were not formal adherents, and the war made spiritualist doctrines increasingly attractive. Mary Todd Lincoln sought regularly to communicate with her dead son Willie. She sponsored a number of séances at the White House, some of which the president himself