This Republic of Suffering [88]
Tellingly, Reverend John Sweet had used this very same phrase to explain death’s meaning to the Baptist congregation mourning Edward Amos Adams. Adams was not sending spiritualist messages from the world beyond, and Sweet, a devout Baptist pastor, was no medium. But Sweet still designated Adams as one of the “speaking dead,” a man whose life and death in themselves—“a life and character that still moves and acts among us”—represented certain immortality. “They whom we call dead have voices for us” and “speak to us by the lives which they have lived.” Like the spiritualist dead, Sweet affirmed, Edward Amos Adams too “still lives.” Mainstream denominations shared many of spiritualism’s consoling tenets and its promise that the dead remained, in important ways, still with them.31
The reassurances of spiritualism reached their broadest audience through popular fiction. After Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the best-selling book of the nineteenth century was Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar. If Stowe’s novel, as Lincoln reportedly remarked to its author, helped to cause the war, Phelps’s work dealt with the war’s consequences. Within twenty years of its 1868 publication, The Gates Ajar had been reprinted fifty-five times. Enterprising marketers even devised Gates Ajar funeral wreaths, cigars, and patent medicines.
Phelps began to write the book in 1864, when she was just twenty years old, at a time, she said, when the “country was dark with sorrowing women.” A soldier with whom she was in love had been killed at Antietam, but she recognized that her own personal grief was simply part of an inescapable “material miasma” of loss and pain. Phelps wrote in order to “say something that would comfort some few…of the women whose misery crowded the land.” Looking back thirty years later, Phelps remembered that she had not “thought so much about the suffering of men—the fathers, the brother, the sons.” The mourners she sought to console were the women, “the helpless, outnumbering, unconsulted women; they whom war trampled down, without a choice or protest.” Men had fought and died, but now they were beyond help. It was the victimization and sacrifice of the women who continued to suffer that attracted her concern. After her book appeared, these women wrote her by the thousands. “For many years,” Phelps reported, “I was snowed under by those mourners’ letters…signs of human misery and hope.”32
The Gates Ajar is structured as the journal of Mary Cabot, a young woman who has just learned that her brother Roy has been “shot dead.” Unable to reconcile herself to his loss or resign herself to God’s will, she is near despair when her aunt Winifred arrives for an unexpected visit. A widow with a young child, fittingly named Faith, Winifred offers Mary a new understanding of heaven, together with the assurance that she will be reunited with Roy, “not only to look at standing up among the singers,” as an angel with a harp, but “close to me; somehow or other to be as near as—to be nearer than—he was here—really mine again.”33
Mary’s pastor has provided her only an unsatisfactory vision of a place dedicated to “harping and praying” and to endless glorifying of God, a place that would “crowd out all individuality and human joy,” a place beyond any special personal human attachments. “He gave me glittering generalities, cold commonplace, vagueness, unreality, a God and a future at which I sat and shivered.” Mary is clear-sighted about what she needs to believe. “I wanted something actual, something pleasant, about this place into which Roy has gone.”34
Winifred readily offers it. Harps, choirs, white robes, pearl gates, she explains, are all just symbols, not the reality of heaven at all. Instead the future life is very like Earth at its most ideal, with trees and mountains, with houses filled with books, pianos, and pictures, and with individuals preserved as themselves, looking as they did in life, maintaining their own bodies and identities. Roy is, Winifred assures Mary, “only,