This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [86]
The promise That in the spirit-land,
Meeting at thy right hand,
’Twill be our heaven to find that—he is there!
Bowditch’s struggle to grapple with—to “realize”—the loss of his son was made considerably easier by Pierpont’s assurance that he was only invisible, that he lived on in another, only temporarily inaccessible world. Swedenborg’s comforting ideas about heaven were central to spiritualist ideology and spiritualism’s appeal, and such sentiments played a prominent place in Nathaniel’s funeral sermon as well, which assured mourners that “he is just the other side of the thin veil…He stands there, waiting till you come.”21
In New Orleans an officer of the Native Guard led an active spiritualist circle called the Grandjean Séance. Within weeks of André Cailloux’s death, the group made contact with their departed hero. “They thought they had killed me but they made me live,” Cailloux reported from the afterlife. “It will be I who receive you into our world if you die in the struggle, so fight!” He consoled his black comrades that “there must be victims to serve as stepping stones on the path to liberty.”22
Extensive marketing of the planchette, precursor of the Ouija board, during the 1860s, and especially in the years immediately following the war, offered everyone the opportunity to be a medium and turned spiritualist exploration into a parlor game. A heart-shaped piece of wood on three legs, the planchette was believed to move in response to spiritual forces passing through the hands that rested upon it. The device, often equipped with a pencil, could point to letters of the alphabet or actually write out messages from the dead. In the North planchettes were available in a variety of woods and decorative styles; they transformed spiritual communication into a fashionable and “novel amusement.”23
Spiritualists held their first national convention in Chicago in 1864, marking a growing prominence and self-consciousness that extended well beyond the realm of popular amusement. “Virtually everyone,” historian R. Laurence Moore has observed, “conceded that spirit communication was at least a possibility.” Amid a war that was erasing not only lives but identities, the promise, as one spiritualist spokesman wrote, of the “imperishability of the individual and the continuation of the identical Ego” after death was for many irresistible. “And you will never lose your identity,” John Edmonds and George T. Dexter assured readers of Spiritualism, first published in 1853 and then reprinted throughout the rest of the century. “Physical death does not affect the identity of the individual.”24
Spiritualism responded to a question of pressing importance to the soldier and his kin. As an 1861 article in the spiritualist newspaper Banner of Light posed it, “he desires to know what will become of himself after he has lost his body. Shall he continue to exist?—and, if so, in what condition?” Each issue of the paper provided a chorus of answers, a “Message Department” of “Voices from the Dead” transmitted through “Mrs. J. H. Conant, while in a condition called the Trance.” Confederates and Yankees alike chimed in; soldiers of all ranks and origins reported that they had died well, that they had met relatives in heaven, and that, as one voice declared, “death has taken nothing from me, except my body.” Stonewall Jackson weighed in to defend his actions (“I adopted the course I took because I felt it was right for me to”), and Willie Lincoln sent regular communications.25
Philip Gregg, a Confederate killed three months before his appearance in print in April 1862, observed that “the emotions of the