Without crucible or scalpel: A sympathetic history of American Spiritualism.

Abstract

The American Spiritualist movement originated in 1848 in the Burned Over District of New York State, coalescing around the claims of the Fox sisters to having opened a spiritual telegraph line for communication with the dead. When the philosophical system of the mesmeric visionary, Andrew Jackson Davis, was engrafted onto the Foxes' physical practice, the movement blossomed, becoming the fastest growing religion in America during the 1850s, and one of the principal responses to the widespread perception that American society was descending into an atomistic abyss. At the center of Spiritualist praxis was a reinvigoration of Enlightenment theories of sympathy, the linchpin of moral philosophical theories of social cohesion. From the time of David Hume and Adam Smith, moral philosophers speculated that the free exchange of sympathy, and the checks and balances of mutual emotional indebtedness that resulted, created the conditions in which the selfish tendencies of individuals could be curbed, enabling social bonds to form. Sympathy sounded as well in an occult register, where it appeared as a supernatural force, and in physiological registers as well, where it referred to the reciprocal exchange of nervous excitation, connecting disparate organs within and between bodily systems. Characteristically, Spiritualists sought to transform sympathetic theory into social practice, arguing that each individual, living and dead, was situated within an extended nexus of affective exchange that promised to transcend all the barriers dividing society---the ultimate symbol of which was the transcendence of the barrier of death in spirit communion. Although Spiritualism was famously associated with progressive and reformist causes, its actual political and social expression was far greater, with the extremes (proslavery and antislavery) cohering solely in their commitment to practices of sympathy made possible by differential mapping of the boundaries of the sympathetic community. In the changing political and social circumstances of the post-Civil War period, Spiritualist sympathy discovered its ultimate boundaries in the increasingly refractory concept of race. On earth, and in heaven, Spiritualists redefined the community of affective exchange to permit the sectional reconciliation of whites through the exclusion of blacks.