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The Humbug in American Religion: Ritual Theories of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

David Walker
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Abstract

This essay examines critical modes and dependencies of mid-nineteenth century spiritualism. It looks at the relationship between the ritual dynamics and promotional framings of rappings and séances, and it considers the contested location of those practices within nineteenth-century theories of religion. The argument is threefold: that components of spiritualist practice are better understood alongside certain commercial enterprises; that their examination demands reconsideration of the relative importance of belief, intellection, and criticism in religious ritual; and that, in light of nineteenth-century Americans' own critical thinking on these matters, we understand better the ways in which spiritualism itself became both a location and datum for Americans' definitions of religion. The long-ignored religious theory of P. T. Barnum supports reclamation of the Fox sisters' own ritual practices even as it illustrates the processes by which they were gradually exorcised from American religions, spiritualism, and their historiography. Meanwhile, evidence from court records, newspaper reports, and the professional careers of mediums and their debunkers aids reconstruction of a religious movement that consisted largely, for a time, in the formal recognition of its own skepticism and operational intrigue.

Keywords

spiritualismritualskepticismP. T. BarnumFox sisters
Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , Winter 2013 , pp. 30 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2013

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References

Notes

I am grateful to faculty and student members of the American religious history workshop and writing group at Yale University for their guidance and feedback.

1. Rochester Daily Democrat, November 15, 16, 1849.

2. The pamphlet, coauthored by Lee, Charles A., Coventry, C. B., and Flint, Austin, collectively known as “the Buffalo Doctors,” is reproduced, along with the Foxes' response, in Rochester Knockings! Discovery and Explanation of the Source of the Phenomena Generally Known as the Rochester Knockings (Buffalo, N.Y.: George H. Derby and Co., 1851)Google Scholar. The Buffalo Doctors' charges were printed also in the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, February 18, 1851, and in the Buffalo Medical Journal (March 1851). Lee later recalled writing the exposé in 1850. Lee, Charles A., “Dr. Lee on Spiritualism,” New York Tribune, July 22, 1859 Google Scholar.

3. Lee, “Dr. Lee on Spiritualism.”

4. Chapin, David, Exploring Other Worlds: Margaret Fox, Elisha Kent Kane, and the Antebellum Culture of Curiosity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 52 Google Scholar. See Moore, R. Laurence, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Moore, R. Laurence, “Spiritualism and Science: Reflections on the First Decade of the Spirit Rappings,” American Quarterly 24, no. 4 (October 1972): 474–500 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walters, Ronald, American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978)Google Scholar; Braude, Ann, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Carroll, Bret E., Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

5. Albanese, Catherine L., A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), chap. 4 Google Scholar; Gutierrez, Cathy, Plato's Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cox, Robert S., Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

6. McGarry, Molly, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Modern, John Lardas, “Ghosts of Sing Sing, or the Metaphysics of Secularism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75, no. 3 (September 2007): 615–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, with Reference to Ghosts, Protestant Subcultures, Machines, and Their Metaphors; Featuring Discussions of Mass Media, Moby-Dick, Spirituality, Phrenology, Anthropology, Sing Sing State Penitentiary, and Sex with the New Motive Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), esp. 32–45, 239–78. On modern media technologies (especially the telegraph) and their functional and conceptual implementation by spiritualists, see also the work of Jeremy Stolow, for example, “Salvation by Electricity,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 668–86, 949–60. With respect to McGarry's work, it may be worth quoting part of a book review by Catherine Albanese, wherein Albanese cites approvingly McGarry's “refus[al] to be preoccupied with the too-easy discourse of fraud, the conventional ritual of denial that historians have often used to dismiss spiritualists from thoughtful examination” (Catherine L. Albanese, review of Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America, by Molly McGarry, American Historical Review 114, no. 2 [April 2009]: 441). I admit to preoccupation precisely with the discourse of fraud, in this essay, and to persistent concern with its historical and historiographical operations. Such discourse is never simple, its (rightly identified) “conventional[ity]” notwithstanding, and historians have still insufficiently attended not only to the types of “thoughtful examination” that may occur in “ritual[s] of denial” themselves but also to the ways in which spiritualists have assumed and enabled them.

7. For E. B. Tylor's interpretation of spiritualism as a survival of prescientific primitivism consisting of, and stemming from, the inability to differentiate associations from causations and the confusion of imagination and reality, see Tylor, Edward Burnett, Primitive Culture, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), 1: 128–44Google Scholar.

8. My interest in and understanding of spiritualism have been shaped by the previously cited scholars as well as by others, some of whose work speaks less explicitly about the data of spiritualism. Among these is Leigh Schmidt's study of American Enlightenment-era attempts to explain (as artifice, perceptual fallacy, and institutional priestcraft) religious impetuses and developments and to narrate (in natural histories of religion) and perform (as secular entertainment and magic shows) their explanations. My own work follows Schmidt's while also stressing the ambiguous social situations, frameworks of performed consideration, and opportunities for definitional intellection created by a mutually assuming scientific/religious milieu. Also influential has been the work of Ann Taves, with its focus—complementary to Schmidt's—on spiritualists' attempt to mediate naturalistic and supernaturalistic approaches to religious experience. Extending Taves's posited loci of religious theory-making to additional groups in- and outside spiritualist circles, my work observes people's efforts not only to challenge or dissolve dichotomies between experience, explanation, naturalism, and supernaturalism but also to play with and within them, upholding them always as distinct posts and canopies for religious ground. I am also indebted to the work of: Michael Leja, on skeptical assumption in artistic production and consumption; Karen Halttunen, on mid-nineteenth century American preoccupations with sincerity and transparency; David Chidester and Randall Styers, on the social and rhetorical work of claims to authenticity and magic; Alex Owen, on the double role of “enchantment” as carrier and critique of culture; and Simon During, Fred Nadis, and other scholars of magical performance. See Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Schmidt, Leigh Eric, “From Demon Possession to Magic Show: Ventriloquism, Religion, and the Enlightenment,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 67, no. 2 (1998): 274–304 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taves, Ann, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), esp. 3–4, 166–206 Google Scholar; Leja, Michael, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Halttunen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Chidester, David, Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Styers, Randall, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Owen, Alex, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; During, Simon, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Nadis, Fred, Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press: 2005)Google Scholar.

9. See, for example, Fornell, Earl Wesley, The Unhappy Medium: Spiritualism and the Life of Margaret Fox (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Stuart, Nancy Rubin, The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox (New York: Harcourt, 2005)Google Scholar; and Weisberg, Barbara, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2004)Google Scholar.

10. By reclaiming this different significance in silence, I follow the work of David Chapin, whose study of explorer Elisha Kane and medium Margaret Fox posits that both operated in a common “culture of curiosity.” Chapin writes that the Fox sisters “appeal[ed] to the new mass culture of curiosity” by “actively creat[ing] themselves as passive objects of investigation” and by “offering themselves as scientific exhibits rather than the skilled performers they had become.” They invited others “to explore … and ultimately to provide their own answers, thus giving the audience the active role” (Chapin, Exploring Other Worlds, 97–99). Other scholars have read the active passivity of the Fox sisters to differently important effect. Molly McGarry, for example, has observed that the Fox sisters and other young, white, rural, and ostensibly guileless and retreating women were, by means of those (perceived) characteristics, effective agents of a movement that simultaneously affirmed and contradicted aspects of Victorian domesticity. Such female mediums challenged separate-sphere domestic values by publicly performing the “characteristics that had been used to deem women unfit for public life—piety, passivity, and purity” and by embodying a transgressive and challenging ancestry (McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past, 44). If I focus less on the gender politics of spiritualism here, it is in order to highlight formal, ritual, advertising dynamics and public interests sometimes sublimated by an established instrumentalist historiography.

11. Drawing on Neil Harris's study of P. T. Barnum, I am taking “operationality” to indicate and encompass operations (the mechanics of things displayed), an operational gaze (the attention to those mechanics by viewers), and, within that gaze, a focus on utility. See Harris, Neil, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973)Google Scholar.

12. Scholars of religion have long recognized that belief is, or can be, a theologically laden category used to privilege the institutions and operations of certain, generally Protestant-inflected, religions. (See, for example, Donald S. Lopez's discussion of the issue: “Belief,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark Taylor [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 21–35. See also Benson Saler's discussion of “the prevailing folk theory of belief in our society,” a simplified mental state theory informed by arguably Protestant etymology: “On What We May Believe about Beliefs,” in Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience, ed. Jensine Andresen [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 47–69, citation at 54.) Should historians wish to retain the notion of belief as component to religion and its study (as I think we must, to the degree that our subjects themselves debate it, and to the degree that they institutionalize their debates), we might learn to speak of belief consisting of different types of propositional assent—doubt and distrust alongside confidence, for example—claimed and enacted strategically in different contexts; or, in a more dispositional vein, to describe belief as a contextual inclination to articulate, for purposes of public consideration and comprehension, identities and behaviors ostensibly based upon it. At any rate, propositional articulations entail the concurrent recognition and consideration of countervailing propositions. (Compare Saler's discussion of the Lockean propositional gray-scale in “On What We May Believe about Beliefs”; and Simon During's similar reflections on Wittgenstein, Locke, and belief in Modern Enchantments, 48.) Would-be believers think about, even assent to—yea, even perform—the terms of co-dependent and co-constituent possibilities. Ambivalent consideration and ambidextrous performance are basic to human practice, cognition, and religion. “Belief” is, in any case, a contested term in a broad game of language and identity—and spiritualism demonstrates well that contestation. Thus, unless we are prepared to deny spiritualists’ religiosity, thereby siding with the debunkers and apologists discussed here, spiritualists teach historians that explanations of religion need not assume its sui generis irreducibility or its reducibility to beliefs, just as beliefs need not be taken as matters of unambiguous, unconditional, wholesale propositional assent with ineffable content and direct result.

13. Taussig, Michael, “Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic,” in In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century, ed. Dirks, Nicholas B. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 247, 249, 240Google Scholar; Taussig, Michael, “Secrecy Magnifies Reality,” in Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 47–97, at 68Google Scholar; Taussig, , “Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism,” 222 Google Scholar.

14. Readers will recognize the allusion to Jonathan Z. Smith's “In Comparison a Magic Dwells” (in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], 19–35) here. My notion of intellection in religion is influenced by Smith's discussions of socially performed and materially enabled considerations. By his account, religions engage in the juxtaposition of different conditions and interpretations—both real and ideal, descriptive and prescriptive—and people, recognizing those juxtapositions, think through the gaps left between that which is juxtaposed. See also Smith, Jonathan Z., Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 16–19 Google Scholar.

15. The literature on antebellum America is huge, dense, and conflicted. With respect to religion, key concerns are triangulated by three now-classic books: Johnson, Paul E., A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978)Google Scholar; Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Johnson, Paul E. and Wilentz, Sean, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. Describing religious innovations in an era of purported “democracy,” amid industrial developments and frontier disillusionments, these works debate, among other things, the degree to which they were egalitarian or restrictive, centrifugal or centripetal. The spiritualism of my concern might be considered a centripetal space for the consideration of centrifugal matters, a place where interpretive tensions were elevated and vetted, for a time, and where human possibilities were reimagined within acknowledged human restrictions. Results could be revolutionary or not, quietistic or not, scripted or not. The success of many spiritualistic practitioners, in any case, lay in their ability, rather than satisfying social demands for transparency and guilelessness (cf. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women), to embody an ambiguity ostensibly capable of audience dissection, i.e., to invite a kind of hands-on analysis not always possible in other “democratic” sectors. The most recent contribution to the historiography on antebellum religions and their politics, John Lardas Modern's Secularism in Antebellum America, offers much insight into the cultural work done by spiritualists' correctives (or counterparts) to democratic failures. According to his analysis, basic epistemic principles (namely, Scottish Common Sense's presumptions of humans' ability, through self-knowledge and empirical trial, to understand and act reasonably in the world) and political concerns (republican ideals of self-government and public decorum) cooperated in producing and defending nineteenth-century America's generally Protestant secularity. This was a state in which reason was assumed to “separat[e] social life into private and public realms”—religion and nonreligion— even as it “eras[ed] the boundary between piety and politics in practice” (ibid., 20). At America's center were its liberal and rightly religious subjects: people who comported themselves piously and reasonably, in public and private, who assumed the righteousness of secularism's epistemic and republican assumptions, and who thought that proper resolutions to social problems entailed better divisions of public and private, or more sustained applications of piety and reason. The system was built to support itself, by Modern's estimation, having within it the tools by which tensions were diffused, deferred, or re-incorporated. There existed an automatic, systemic response, then, whenever people felt “haunted” by perceptions of opacity and tyranny amid their society of promised transparency and republicanism. Namely, that they might seek solace via renewed analyses of perception itself, or through reiterations of secularism's “first principles.” (“Private and public realms are separate,” according to this principled mantra, “yet they are similarly ordered and legible.”) Modern's society and my spiritualism have affinity in that both found ways to address and incorporate concerns generated by their own operations. But Modern's treatment of spiritualism itself differs from mine with respect to the primary function of ritual in society and regarding the ways in which mediums themselves gave voice to America's “system.” Modern's argument is that spiritualists, insofar as they placed “hauntings” (and/or other phenomena stemming fromcultural unease with secularism and its explanatory potential) back into the realm of public scrutiny, effectively “ritualized the ethics of legibility” and “diffused their unsettling charge,” assuring people that hauntings were translatable and compatible with familiar epistemics and politics, or that they referred to matters of private and banal significance (ibid., 42). ( “Mediation was in fact a distillation of republican politics,” said Modern's spiritualists' spirits, and “encounters with ghosts were often comforting, mundane affairs, as notable as having tea with friends or making cheese at home” [ibid., 41–42].) Thus,Modern's spiritualists furthered the peculiar metaphysics of antebellum secularism, reshaping subjects and subjectivities already basic to Western culture. But I think the situation was more complicated, having at least one more layer, basing itself in a different type of ritual action. While sympathetic to Modern's portrayal of spiritualists' ironic, subjective conservatisms—especially in light of the long-running tendency to overestimate mediums' radicalism in an American democracy of erstwhileoverestimated egalitarianism—I think that spiritualists did more to address openly the “epistemological and political dilemmas of opacity and mediation” than Modern says (ibid., 42) and that they did so differently. Crucially, whereas Modern says that “the experience of haunting” in spiritualism, “rather than introduce discontinuity into one's being, often fueled the repetition of sovereignty” (ibid., 44), I find that spiritualism did introduce discontinuity, if only fleetingly, precisely as the business of religion. The Foxes and similar mediums brought together frames, data, expectations, and conversations from various and mutually differentiated poles of modernity, highlighting their tensions in order to camp uncomfortably between them, somewhere, and in order that others might do so, too, for a time. That is to say: spiritualists re-examined not merely the hauntings caused by cultural disconnects (à la Modern) but also the disconnects themselves; and they did so not simply to diffuse, privatize, or render them banal but also to enliven, publicize, and render them questionable, playing with principles of discernment even while problematizing their possibilities. (Even the domestic cheesemaking incident may be understood in this light, as an exercise in comparative thought and categorical challenge, an invitation to reconsider whether religion had more to do with matters commonplace or extraordinary, old or new.) This does not mean that spiritualists and their rituals were necessarily more radical, egalitarian, or democratic than Modern says, only different. They were more contested and contestable, and they traded in translations less tautological and comparisons less collapsing. There is room, still, for the argument that spiritualists furthered “governmentality,” if not government, by re-articulating (or “putting into discourse,” to use another Foucauldian phrase) the types of modern dichotomies and relational considerations that—while affording them a space of operations, for a time— also factored in their exorcism from the category of religion. But that is a different story, and it must begin first with appreciation of how some spiritualists invited critical appraisals of their own forms, and how some people considered such invitations, criticisms, forms, and business to be rightly religious, or not.

16. Chapin, Exploring Other Worlds, 93. See Taussig, “Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism,” for discussion of anthropologists' unwitting participation in ritual productions, too.

17. R. Laurence Moore argues that spiritualists “disassociat[ed] [themselves] from any occult tradition and appeal[ed], not to the inward illumination of mystic experience, but to the observable and verifiable objects of empirical science”; that they “eschewed all interest in the marvelous and sought to erase supernatural as a category of human thought.” Moore, “Spiritualism and Science,” 477, 478. By his account, both spiritualists and their scientific observers wished to prove their empiricist chops and to determine the degree to which the world's phenomena were subject to the same laws and tests. See Chapin, Exploring Other Worlds, 48. On the “vague Baconianism” of some spiritualists, see also Hazen, Craig James, The Village Enlightenment in America: Popular Religion and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), esp. chap. 2 Google Scholar. On Bacon's own hopes for the future of magical performance, see Schmidt, Hearing Things, 153–55. Ann Taves speaks of spiritualists' “religious naturalism” in Fits, Trances, and Visions, 3, 6,166–206. JohnLardas Modern discusses spiritualists' Common Sense promises of legibility in Secularism in Antebellum America, 32–45.

18. There was a time when Barnum's name was associated often with the Fox sisters, but not always for good reason; some books name Barnum as the sisters' promoter or publicist, but that seems to be a mistake based upon their residence at a hotel owned by a different Barnum. See, for example, Fornell, The Unhappy Medium, 24. Chapin is a helpful debunker of the myth of direct Barnum connection; see Chapin, Exploring Other Worlds, 98, 231–32 n. 1.

19. Harris, Humbug.

20. Ibid., 23.

21. Ibid., 57, 20–23, 62–67, 74; Barnum, Phineas T., Humbugs of the World (New York: Carleton, 1866), 53–55 Google Scholar. On Barnum's “art” and its cultural significance, see also Cook, James, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

22. Barnum was here proposing a different sense of humbug than that generally in vogue; rather than seeing humbug as simple “imposition under false pretenses,” Barnum wanted to reserve humbug for cases of goods promotion through novel, glittering, attentiongrabbing, and questionable rhetoric and media. Another example may illuminate the distinction: “Two actors appear … at two rival theatres. They are equally talented, equally pleasing. One advertises himself simply as a tragedian … —[while] the other boasts that he is a prince, and wears decorations presented by all the potentates of the world… . He is correctly set down as a ‘humbug,’ while this term is never applied to the other actor.” But if it were to turn out that the self-styled prince “is a miserable actor, or [if he] pretends to devote the proceeds of his [acting] to some charitable object, without, in fact, doing so,” then he was a simple imposter and a cheat, not a true humbug in Barnum's sense. See Barnum, Humbugs of the World, 18–20.

23. Harris, Humbug, 67, 74.

24. Indeed, it was partly for this reason that Barnum mixed fact and fiction in his museums; as he argued in Humbugs of the World, the only thing worse than someone who trusted everything was one who refused to trust anything. See Barnum, Humbugs of the World, 53.

25. Harris, Humbug, 77.

26. Not unlike the American philosophes and ventriloquism experts described elsewhere by Leigh Eric Schmidt, we see here Barnum, having studied specific social phenomena (the sources and sites of claims to unusual character), and having developed corresponding technologies and terms of analysis (advertising and humbug), apply them also to religion—and, thus, class the Fox sisters, the Delphian oracle, practitioners of voodoo, and others alongside the aforementioned humbugging physician. As with Schmidt's subjects, the aim here was to develop a natural history of religion and of religious institutions, one freed of certain claims to supernatural ability or exclusive location, and one thus libratory to peoples stupefied and trapped by priestly impostures. Indeed, Schmidt mentions P. T. Barnum's “exhibit of supernatural humbug” and “moralizing history of impostures” as things designed to “inculcat[e] … a healthy skepticism” in his Hearing Things, 99, and in “From Demon Possession to Magic Show,” 297–98.

27. They were, thus, considered “humbugs” according to the older, baser, and more common sense of the term, not according to Barnum's attempted reformulation of it.

28. Bly, M. V., Errors Corrected: An Address by the Spirit of Stephen Treadwell … Delivered through the Organism of M. V. Bly (New York: S. T. Munson, 1857)Google Scholar.

29. “Spiritualism Tested!” Boston Herald, April 15, 1859. The reporter describes medium Ada L. Coan, significantly, thus: “She claims to read the name of a spirit friend when written on a piece of paper and then folded securely. This, she claims to do unconsciously,—but whether the performance is consummated by the action of departed spirits, she cannot say, and on this point has, we believe, always been non-committal.” At this event, Coan and Bly performed in front of, and then addressed, a shared audience and investigatory committee at the Melodian in Boston. Apparently, it was “the verdict of the committee and audience” that “Mr. Bly operated and performed the same phenomena, in a manner equal, if not superior to the lady.” At the conclusion, Coan thanked Bly for his demonstrations and debunking efforts, “bore testimony to [his] fairness, candor and honesty,” and, without conceding any defeat, insisted that he had aided the spiritualist cause by driving “prominent … imposters” from town. See also “Spiritualism Tested: Coan vs. Bly,” Boston Herald, April 16, 1859.

Between this shared Bly-Coan event (1859) and the earlier Bly Quaker séance (1857), there was at least one other Melodian show where Bly, in a solo performance, described, mimicked, and debunked Coan's demonstrations. It was after that event that Coan accepted an invitation from Bly to team up and perform together, perhaps in recognition of the codependency of their enterprises. Discussions of Bly solo shows at “Excitement among the Boston Spiritualists,” Baltimore Sun, December 31, 1858; “Spiritualism Exposed,” New York Times, December 31, 1858; and “Spiritualism Exposures,” New York Tribune, January 1, 1859.

30. Fred Nadis has noted the somewhat liminal stature of people like Houdini within a nevertheless common vocational trend—as seen in other members of a socio-economically ascendant middle class—from populist religious or mystical performance to secular performance and scientific lectureships (Wonder Shows, 113–15). Some post-hoc newspaper accounts state that Bly was a more simple brand of opportunist; having failed to make his skill-set pay in one market, he plied it in a second. See, for example, “Dr. Martin Van Buren Bly and the Times,” Spiritual Magazine 2, no. 1 (January 1861): 29–32.

31. Frank Podmore evidently recognized this dualism of performance; in his 1902 history of spiritualism in England, he wrote that Bly “seems to have attempted to double the part of ‘medium’ and exposer of Spiritualism” (Podmore, Modern Spiritualism: A History and Criticism, 2 vols. [London: Methuen, 1902], 2: 52).

32. “Dr. M. V. Bly,” Times (London), December 8, 1860, 12.

33. “Dr. M. V. Bly,” Musical World 38, no. 51 (December 22, 1860): 810.

34. “Dr. Martin Van Buren Bly and the Times.”

35. Ibid.

36. “Dr. M. V. Bly,” Spiritual Magazine 2, no. 2 (February 1861): 92–93.

37. The “correspondent says nothing about the ballots revealed on the second evening,” Bly noted tauntingly; and, even though he implied that ballot and pellet tests were likewise “caused by the mediums’ own spirit,” he refused to say whether it was done “consciously or unconsciously,” and to what ends. Ibid.

38. Cf. Harris, Humbug, 77.

39. “Dr. M. V. Bly,” Spiritual Magazine. Fred Nadis talks of “The Mysterious Man” (in his Wonder Shows, 113–20), noting that his advertisements failed to identify whether he was a spiritualist or an antispiritualist. Nadis says that such ambiguity was a box-office driven stance of a low rung of performers, and, while he is absolutely right that economics were important here, I think that ambiguous advertisement techniques might have other stories to tell about ritual dynamics in and around spiritualism, too.

40. For Barnum's American Museum advertisements of exhibitions by Von Vleck, see, for example, “Amusements” section listings in the New York Daily Tribune (February 23, 1865, 2; and February 23, 1865, 7) and New York Times (March 11, 1865, 7; and March 25, 1865, 7). Von Vleck's show was generally slotted between a comic performance called “Dancing Giraffe” and the display of life-size figures of Japanese people. Barnum describes Von Vleck's debunking activities and qualifications in Humbugs of the World (81–84). For Von Vleck's recollection of encounters and cooperation with spiritualist performers, see W. F. Von Vleck, “Exposure of Spiritualism: What Laura Ellis Did, and How She Did It; The Fay Performances as Described by a Performer; A Detailed Account of Wholesale Jugglery,” St Louis Globe-Democrat, August 20, 1876. Finally, it is worth noting also Von Vleck's own ambiguous position in spiritualist history writing; some later writers reclaimed him to spiritualist apologetic ends, stating that, his intentions notwithstanding, his powers did come from spirits, and/or that his actions helped purify spiritualism by purging it of charlatans. See, for example, Paschal Beverly Randolph, After Death: The Disembodiment of Man: The World of Spirits, Its Location, Extent, Appearance; The Route Thither; Inhabitants; Customs; Societies; Also Sex and Its Uses There, etc. etc.; With Much Matter Pertinent to the Question of Human Immortality, 4th ed. (Toledo, Ohio: Randolph Publishing, 1886), 96; Moses Hull and William F Jamieson, The Greatest Debate within a Half Century upon Modern Spiritualism (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2009 [1904]); and Wilson, E. V., The Truths of Spiritualism: Immortality Proved beyond a Doubt by Living Witnesses (Chicago: Hazlitt and Reed, 1876), 105–8Google Scholar.

41. See, for example, the broadside advertisement for a performance of “The Grand Elusinian Spectacle of Magic & Mystery by Professor Anderson, the Great Wizard of the North” at the Royal Lyceum Theater, October 22, 1855. On it, at left, is printed a description of Anderson's demonstrations against spiritualism; but at right, underneath the image of a spiritualist séance, appears also a prospiritualism letter by the medium D. D. Home, reporting positively on the advance of the religion in London. (A copy of this broadside is housed at the Beinecke Library, Yale University.) Karl Bell has written about Anderson's displays as “cater[ing] for both … ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures” as people looked either for technological demonstration or magical enchantment in the world, and about the “ambiguity of magic and theatricality” more generally, in his, “Remaking Magic: The ‘Wizard of the North’ and Contested Magical Mentalities in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Magic Show,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 4, no. 1 (Summer 2009): 31, 28.

42. In fact, an 1864 spiritualist publication suggests a more direct connection between Bly and Colchester: Bly reportedly instructed a fellow debunker in the tricks of Colchester's trade so that the latter could expose them in public. But, as this second debunker began to perform as a spiritualist instead, the task of discrediting the medium fell to the New York courts and Internal Revenue System. See “Professor Taylor of the Colosseum,” Spiritual Magazine 5, no. 1 (January 1864): 14–19.

43. “The Spirits on Trial at Buffalo,” New York Herald, August 23, 1865. For a recent and commiserating account of the Colchester trial—and of mediums' and magicians' often contentious yet generally co-dependent relations more broadly—see Dyson, Erika White, “‘Gentleman Mountebanks’ and Spiritualists: Legal, Stage and Media Contest Between Magicians and Spirit Mediums in the United States and England,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. Willburn, Sarah and Kontou, Tatiana (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2012), 231–66Google Scholar.

44. “Do Spiritual Communications Require Revenue Stamps—A Curious Case,” Chicago Tribune, August 17, 1865.

45. “The Spirits on Trial at Buffalo.”

46. Colchester gained a certain notoriety in history—and a certain notice in subsequent biographies—through brief association with Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln circa 1862. Invited to hold a séance at the Lincolns’ Soldier's Home, Colchester was later investigated by officers of the Smithsonian, at Mr. Lincoln's encouragement, and then asked to discontinue communication with Mrs. Lincoln and others in their immediate circle. See Brooks, Noah, Washington in Lincoln's Time (New York: Century Co., 1895), 64–66 Google Scholar; and Maynard, Nettie Colburn, Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist?: or, Curious Revelations from the Life of a Trance Medium (Philadelphia: R. C. Hartrant, 1891), 92, 178, 263Google Scholar.

47. “Is Spiritualism Jugglery?” New York Herald, August 21, 1865.

48. The term magician assumes its contradistinction from “priest” or the like, magicians being rendered secular (perhaps postreligious, but, in any, case extrareligious) or demonic (thus, subreligious) relative to certain religious practitioners. We have here a trial wherein the magician/priest divide is implicitly tried and a defensive argument that consists, in part, in a resistance to the prosecution's presumptive secularization of the magicians’ guild, partly in resistance to classification therein, and partly in the reclamation of religious benefits offered by classes of borderline practitioners.

49. “The Spirits on Trial,” New York Herald, August 23, 1865. Readers should note that, though the title is similar and the newspaper and the date are the same, this is a different newspaper article than the one cited in notes 43, 45, and 61.

50. “Spiritualism Is Jugglery,” New York Herald, August 24, 1865.

51. This trial is a forerunner to the 1869 trial of spiritualist William H. Mumler on charges of photographic fraud, which is described in Michael Leja's Looking Askance (chap. 1). Not only was the Barnumesque terminology of “humbug” deployed and debated in the Mumler trial, but Barnum himself also appeared there to do so, arguing, on behalf of the prosecution, against the religious legitimacy of Mumler's “humbuggery.” Barnum's testimony was the high point of the trial, according to Leja, but it was also humorously undermined by the recognized disingenuousness of Barnum's self-description (as guileless purveyor of assumed truth) and by the somewhat discontinuous presentation of humbug in his written work (ibid., 48, 53). The Mumler trial echoed debates about humbugs in religion— and about styles of showmanship that would be legally protected absent proven “truthfulness”—that I locate in the earlier Colchester trial. A major difference consists in the relative degree to which defense, innocence, and acquittal depended upon the absolute existence of spirits, the absolute effectiveness of spirit communication, and the absolute belief of spiritualists in such things. Absolutism was the burden of Mumler's defense, according to Leja, and, consequently, Mumler and his supporters attempted to demonstrate existence, effectiveness, and belief. However, such burden was neither self-evident nor generally accepted in the earlier Colchester trial. At that time, it was still possible to argue more explicitly for a notion that persisted only implicitly in the Mumler trial, for example, in the snickers raised by Barnum's cameo: that “truth was no longer the issue, not even in a court of law… [but rather] the style of the deception” (ibid., 57). Colchester's defenders argued for the validity and utility of Colchester's style: indeterminate, self-reflexive, presumably wellintentioned, and, in any case, productive. The fact of their argumentative failure—as narrated here—may have had something to do with the different, more absolutist, and (to us, now) more recognizably religious tone of argumentation later, in the Mumler trial and beyond.

Additional parallels to the Colchester jugglery case can be found in the charges of ventriloquism leveled against the Davenport brothers; see Schmidt, Hearing Things, 299–300. “Jugglery” and “ventriloquism” were similarly charged terms, signaling and encompassing within their scope activities elsewhere considered sleight-of-hand and sleight-ofvoice, respectively. The use of both, whether in legal, philosophical, and other explanatory contexts, evinced similar concerns about social and formal location within putatively bifurcated or evolving realms of religion, magic, and science.

52. “Is Spiritualism Jugglery?”

53. “The Spirits on Trial.” This Anderson was the son of the more famous anti-spiritualist magician mentioned above.

54. Ibid. Audience response is recorded parenthetically by this and other courtroom reporters.

55. Fleming began by recounting two of his attempts to trick the medium at a séance and by granting Colchester's passing of those tests; Colchester apparently avoided ballots containing the names of living people, and he identified correctly the absence of requested information in others. Fleming did not begrudge the payment of Colchester's twodollar fee on these terms, but he was reticent to label the services rendered “religious,” despite seeing “nothing like trick or sleight of hand,” and despite leaving with lingering questions about whether the medium had “some spontaneous power within himself of which I knew nothing.” See “Is Spiritualism Jugglery?”; and “Spiritualism in Court,” Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1865.

56. Ibid. Such figures and claims would, of course, persist in debates about what religion ought to be in order to earn recognition from federal courts: private, solemn, sincere, old, moral, and otherworldly.

57. Enumerations based on New York Herald coverage and courtroom transcript. Regarding the humor of Cook's defenses, consider this exchange: when one witness complained that Colchester had given him misinformation about his marital prospects, Cook replied, “There are often disappointments in such affairs; you ought to be glad of your escape. (Laughter.)” “The Spirits on Trial.”

58. Ibid.

59. Religion consisting crucially in the mediated and contested articulation of “religion,” it is significant not only that the Colchester trial argumentation centered, explicitly and self-avowedly, on semantics and philology, but also that mundanity, utility, and belief were implicitly identified as the fulcrums of terminological distinction. In this legal, discursive construction of religion, then, belief was, in a certain sense, central; its contentiousness and adjudication made it so. It should be noted, however, that debate did not always occur in positive terms; belief was not always the most valued term elevated by anti-spiritualists or prescribed by them as necessary for spiritualists’ transition to licit and proper religion. Truth and knowledge and belief in ritual were the central concerns for Charles A. Lee and others, even as their centrality and discernment were debated, and even as some claimed that the debate itself was the only true or constructive thing.

60. “The Spirits on Trial.”

61. For example, one New York Herald article applauded the court's opportunity to “authoritatively announce whether or not spirits can communicate with mortals. Mankind have believed in ghoststories for hundreds of years without being sure whether they were sensible or silly in so doing. The Buffalo jury will place that matter beyond a doubt. Home, the Davenports, Judge Edmonds, the Fox sisters, Greeley, Colorado Jewett, the Thorpe brothers, and spiritualists generally, will await with intense anxiety the legal decision as to whether or not Rochester knockings, table tippings, rope tricks and floating guitars are legitimate spiritual manifestations and communications.” “The Spirits on Trial at Buffalo.”

62. “Spiritualism Exposed,” World, October 21, 1888. On Margaret's public recantation and debunking demonstration, see also Chapin, Exploring Other Worlds, 214–15, and Fornell, The Unhappy Medium, 177–81. Note the structural similarity of her most famous public demonstration, held October 21, 1888, to that of Charles A. Lee in 1850; both events featured a climactic rapping performance, as introduced and explained by a skeptical scientist, in front of a sometimes unruly crowd.

63. See “The Colchester Case. Why the Spiritualist Is Not a Juggler,” New York Times, September 3, 1865; “Judge Hall on Spiritual Mediums,” New York Times, September 30, 1865; and “Spiritualism Pronounced Jugglery by an Intelligent Jury,” New York Herald, August 24, 1865.

64. “Important and Decisive Trial … ,” New York Times, August 31, 1865.

65. “Metropolitan Hall,” New York Daily Tribune, September 1, 1865.

66. Col. Goodwin, as cited in ibid.

67. For coverage of the retrial, see ibid.; “Meeting of Spiritualists at Metropolitan Hall,” New York Herald, August 28, 1865; “Important and Decisive Trial …”; “Colchester before the Spirits,” New York Herald, September 1, 1865; “The Spirits on Trial,” New York Herald, September 8, 1865; and “The Spirits on Trial,” New York Herald, September 15, 1865.

68. “Colchester Repudiated—Judge Edmonds Denounces Him as a Juggler, and Says He Refused to Defend Him,” New York Herald, August 25, 1865. John Lardas Modern gives a helpful overview of Edmonds's spiritualist philosophy in his “Ghosts of Sing Sing,” 617–19. The posited “truth” of Edmonds's “true spiritualism” was an “abstractly democratic” thing, according to Modern, being articulated in keys harmonious with the ideological and technological directives of the modern American state and being compatible with other (notably evangelical) religious languages of nonformalized, yet publicly available and civically productive, natural spirituality.

69. On Horace Greeley's relationship with the Fox sisters, see Weisberg, Talking to the Dead, 113-17; Jackson, Herbert G. Jr., The Spirit Rappers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), 76–87 Google Scholar; and Chapin, Exploring Other Worlds, 83. Greeley writes of his contact with the sisters, and of his frustrations with spiritualist communications in general, in his Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: J. B. Ford, 1868), 234–41; he notes, for example, that “the so-called ‘spiritual communications’ are vague, unreal, shadowy, trivial,” and often inaccurate, and also that spiritualists manage to be morally looser yet no more liberal or philosophically competent than others (240–41).

70. Unnamed class notebook, July 1901, Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Morehouse Family Papers, box 2.

71. George Behringer, notes from William Dexter Wilson's Lecture on Moral Philosophy, January-March 1869, Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. See also E. O’Garro, notes from William Dexter Wilson's Lecture on Moral Philosophy, January- March 1871, Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

72. The ungrammatical nature of spirit messages—along with their often trivial and mundane content—was evoked often in critiques of spiritualism and its mediums in a manner reminiscent of ethnocentric criticisms of “inarticulate” “barbarians.” See Jonathan Z. Smith, “Differential Equations,” in Relating Religion, 238. Note also R. L. Moore's mention of the “ungrammatical sentences of great historical figures” that “contradicted each other and commonly contained trivia,” thus causing problems for spiritualism, in “Spiritualism and Science,” 498.

Much has been made of Margaret Fox's conversion to Catholicism in spiritualist history and historiography, with most implying that she sought penance for and redemption from a career of religious deception and social marginality, perhaps finding in Catholic identity the solace and respectability that she and her husband, Elisha Kane, both desired. (See, for example, Weisberg, Talking to the Dead, 193. See also Chapin, Exploring Other Worlds, 206; Chapin sees “the hierarchic structure of the Catholic Church” as being “as far as one could get from spirit rapping,” and thus, for him, “becoming a Roman Catholic was …Maggie Fox's way of turning her back on spiritualism in favor of tradition and paternalistic authority.”) It is true that Margaret announced Catholicism to be her sole religious location and vocation, for a time, and that she implied the mutual exclusivity of Catholic and spiritualist identity. Yet her association with a tradition sometimes cited, usually negatively, for overt ritualism might tell us something else about spiritualism and ritual itself. Catholicism, like spiritualism, was a site within and against which people theorized formal ritual provisions and the significance of belief therein; Fox found in its institutional spaces the opportunity for articulations of religious identity and its components, just as others found such opportunities in spiritualist ones. Fox used Catholic platforms to denounce her former ritual methods and their social effects as generally irreligious, but others stood elsewhere, including those séance rooms indebted to her previous work, to contest that characterization. Still others subsumed both groups and platforms within different narratives of magic, priestcraft, modernity, and religion. Each location afforded tools and spaces of debatably religious thought and theory, and debate itself helped ensure their continuing socio-institutional vitality and location.

73. National Spiritualist Association, Declaration of Principles, adopted Chicago, Illinois, 1899.

74. David Chidester has argued that purported charlatans and inventors of tradition do religious work insofar as people use them or their products to situate themselves as human beings in human places, that is, to theorize and enact their particular humanity relative to postulated superhuman and subhuman beings and places. See Chidester, , Fakes, Authentic, and Chidester, David, Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

75. Browning, Robert, “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium,”’ in Dramatis Personae (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864), 206, 215Google Scholar.

76. Leah, Ann [Fox] Underhill, The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism (New York: Thomas R. Knox, 1885), 19 Google Scholar; “Katy Fox Will Give the Snap Away,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 12, 1888.