S2 – 9: Wounds

The war was over but the fight to determine the future of the nation continued. And the spirits had much to say. Devastated families cried out for their lost loved ones. Sometimes, the beloved dead answered back.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcomed Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minky.
Colonel Crosby died on April second of eighteen sixty. He
had been one of the first to march out from
Philadelphia with the volunteers at the start of the war.
He took fire throughout the fighting, and at one point

(00:22):
was shot in the head. After he went back into combat,
a bullet shattered his arm, which was then amputated in
a war hospital. Still, he was promoted through the ranks
as his fearlessness made him a strange figure on the battlefield.
Crosby got to know one of the doctors who treated him,
and they started writing letters to each other. His willingness

(00:43):
to face fire after such dire injuries must have puzzled
the doctor as much as it impressed his fellow soldiers.
Crosby explained his daring. You see, he was a spiritualist.
Every time he stepped onto the battlefield, he said, he
felt the presence of his spirit friends all around him.
Their guidance was so real that he lost all awareness

(01:04):
of fear. In his own words, the whizzing of musket
balls produced no more trepidation than the falling rain and
Crosby wasn't the only soldier to say so. Other spiritualists
in the Union Army claimed that spirits had led them
through tremendous fire as well. If his faith was shaken
by the wounds that shattered him, he didn't let on

(01:27):
when he died. The Doctors published a note on Colonel
Crosby's life in the Banner of Light. It was a
testament to spiritualists that the dead leaders who met them
at the seance table also steered them through the battlefield.
Like Crosby, they had led the nation to the end
of the war, covered in scars, yes, but still fighting
to the last. He died in the final confrontations of

(01:49):
the war that forced the surrender at Appomattox. Perhaps he
shared the same feeling that Lincoln expressed to one of
Nettie Colburn's dire yet vague warnings about his own coming death.
In her memoir, Nettie wrote that the President told her,
I shall live till my work is done, and no
earthly power can prevent it, and then it doesn't matter.

(02:13):
But it didn't matter. It mattered to the spiritualists. When
news of Lincoln's assassination reached New York, the community railed
in shared grief. They asked Emma Harding to give a
lecture at the Cooper Institute and address their shocked hearts,
and spiritualists across the country met in their local groups
to grieve their loss, although maybe they grieved less than

(02:34):
others who didn't share their beliefs about life in the
spirit land. While most members of the New Republican Party
mourned Lincoln's death, the Republicans of the Sirk Harmonique in
New Orleans didn't feel the pain of his loss so deeply.
In fact, he was closer to their fellowship than he'd
ever been before. At the end of that year, when

(02:55):
President Andrew Johnson declared a national Day of Thanksgiving, the
er Harmonique hell the seance. They've been meeting again for
a year ever since. On re resigned his commission, but
he wasn't just holding seances. He was also holding office.
In eighteen sixty five, On rehelped create the Friends of

(03:15):
Universal Suffrage. Their political vision was filled with the fire
of the idea universal education, black male suffrage, and distribution
of land by the states to the heads of families.
So when Lincoln spirit appeared to the Sir Carmonique. Of course,
he gave their political vision his blessing. Here's historian Emily Clark.

(03:39):
Abraham Lincoln's first appearance to the Sir Carmenique is on
December seven, sixty five, about seven months after his assassination.
His spirit noted how he was glad that they had
broken the chains of slavery, but he also recognized that
there was a lot of work still to be done. Um.
You know, we shouldn't start patting ourselves on the back,

(03:59):
Justine at He also talks about how those who tried
to stop the progress of freedom would regret those decisions
after death, where you know, those who had suffered for
righteous causes would be blessed by God and happy in
the spirit world. You know, freedom was something that was

(04:19):
created and ordained by God, and while freedom originated in heaven.
His spirit talks about how it's intended to reign on
earth to um and then he signs off the message
like he does many of them. With your brother and friend,
Abraham Lincoln. The work of making sure that a nation

(04:46):
conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all
men and women are created equal would endure the blood
spent to perfect the nation would not be wasted, The
unfinished work of freedom would advance further than ever, the
new birth of liberty would grow to maturity. It was
an assurance that the Sir Carmonique would need to help

(05:08):
them reshape the nation in the mold of the idea,
and it was the fuel they needed to empower the
next step forward reconstruction. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Mankey.

(05:52):
Lincoln was dead, and yet he was everywhere. In fact,
Abraham Lincoln visited far more seances after his death than
he ever could have in life. He was, after all,
the representative of justice and liberty to many, but he
was also a man with a family, and could anyone
have been more devastated by his loss than Mary Todd Lincoln.

(06:14):
Here's historian John Busher. I looked in detail at the
last moments of Lincoln's life before he passed away and
the following moments, and discovered descriptions of the physicians being

(06:34):
asked by Mary Todd Lincoln too cut her a lock
of hair from Lincoln's head. Mary didn't keep the hair,
though she passed it on. She hadn't taken it for herself,
but rather so that she could give it to her
spiritualist friends Cranston, Laurie's wife and daughter. They must have
told Mary that they could use it to hold open

(06:56):
a channel to Old Abe. With the lock of his hair,
they could reach across the border to the spirit world,
just as they had done for Mary after she lost
Willie in eighteen sixty two. Even more, the lock of
hair that they got was gruesome. Today. It's kept safe
by the Chicago Historical Society with a label that reads
taken from President Lincoln's head after he was shot, cut

(07:19):
from the spot where the ball passed through Washington, d c.
April eighteen sixty five. You can find the Historical Society's
image online too, clearly showing the hair still clotted with blood.
But for many spiritualists this would mean that it's still
was charged with the mental energy that left Lincoln's body

(07:39):
on his death. Like so many of the mysteries of spiritualism,
Lincoln's murder was immediately put under the scrutiny of investigation.
A new unit of intelligence agents was responsible for solving
the case. The Secret Service, formed from Alan Pinkerton's National
Detective Agency. They had served as spies for the Union

(08:00):
Army during the Civil War, and surprise surprise, Pinkerton's home
had served as a stop on the underground railroad in
Illinois through the eighteen fifties. Born in a Scottish slum,
Pinkerton had abandoned his efforts to reform Britain and started
over in America. After he established his detective agency, he
set them to work in the service of helping people

(08:22):
escaped slavery, but he assisted powerful interest too, including the
Illinois Central Railroad, and that work put him in touch
with the railroad's attorney, a man named Abraham Lincoln. So
when Pinkerton was brought into the war, he started by
foiling an early attempt on the President's life in eighteen
sixty one. Now, though he had a new and more

(08:44):
sobering task, tips and evidence began flooding his office, so
he recruited an investigator with a talent for sorting through
mountains of paper. This man began his career as a
journalist for the New York Tribune and was the very
same reporter who'd knocked south against Virginia's embargo to report
on the hanging of John Brown. His name was Henry

(09:06):
Steele Allcott, It seems that after his turn as an
undercover reporter, Alcott had enlisted in the signal core of
the Union Army. When illness sent him home from the front,
he ended up sitting behind a desk, tracking the profiteers
who were siphoning money away from the war effort. Now
he was facing the task of sifting through the confessions

(09:26):
and leads regarding Lincoln's murder. He would only be a
part of the investigation for a short time and returned
to New York soon afterward, but he wasn't done investigating frauds.
His keen eye for detail might have made him the
right man to follow a paper trail for the Secret Service,
but he was also a veteran mesmerist from his younger days.

(09:47):
It was a skill that made him the perfect candidate
for a job in the eighteen seventies when a newspaper
sent him north to investigate something unusual, and it would
be a case that would draw him back into the
world of the occult. A story will pick up again
later as Alcott and the Pinkerton's investigated Lincoln's murder. There
were bodyguards assigned to stay with Mary Lincoln in the

(10:08):
midst of her raw suffering. One of those bodyguards later
wrote women spiritualists in some way gained access to her
and poured into her ear pretend messages from her dead husband.
But now she was so weakened, he said that she
wasn't able to resist the cruel cheat. The sittings nearly
drove her mad. At least that was her son Robert's opinion.

(10:32):
He threw the spiritualists out of the house. He hated
their beliefs with a passion, and must have always been
disgusted by his mother's attempts to talk to his dead brothers.
In the following days, he went so far as to
have his grieving mother committed to an insane asylum. Of course,
Mary wasn't the only one to carry on speaking with
the spirit of Lincoln after he died, But then again,

(10:55):
she wasn't the only one grieving either. She kept a
shrine in her closet. Maggie's period of hopeless morning, alongside
her descent into desperate poverty, had started before the war
with Elisha Kine's death. The chaos of the Civil War

(11:18):
had done nothing to lift her spirits either. Every day
she would step into her closet and pull back a
set of black drapes. There sat an engraving of Elisha's face,
surrounded by his gifts to her, the jewels, the handkerchiefs,
the letters, even a map that showed his route of
his journey north. But despite her work as a medium,

(11:39):
Maggie had no map or chart that traced his journey
into death. So she would light a candle in his
memory and weep for him as long as she could
stand it. When she couldn't stand it anymore, she would
drink Brandy was Maggie's companion during the dark years of
the Civil War. As her long legal battles with Elisha's
relative have stretched on. They never relented either. The Canes

(12:03):
never acknowledged his relationship with her, let alone that she
was his wife. But in the midst of her grief,
Maggie did make friends who were willing to find her help.
They initiated a lawsuit against the Canes, arguing that Maggie
was entitled to at least half of a licious estate.
It didn't bring any kind of a swift resolution, though,
and it added another layer to the quarrel that had

(12:25):
already dragged on for years. Here's author Nancy Stewart. Now
the lawsuit takes place in yes where Philadelphia, of course,
where he's from, and his father had been a district
court judge. And the family keeps making these bargains as
they don't want anyone to know he was married to,

(12:46):
quotes the Rapper. Then they'll provide for her for a
nuity out of this five thousand dollars and as a
struggle that goes on for a long long time. In
her boldest gambit, Maggie worked with an author to write
a book that told the story of her relationship with Elisha,
including one hundred and thirty four of their letters. When

(13:07):
the manuscript was sent to the printer, Elisha's brother suddenly
appeared and offered to pay her off with two thousand dollars,
as well as smaller quarterly payments drawn from the mysterious
trust that Elisha had established. When Maggie agreed, she received
the first quarterly payment, but the rest never came. During
the war, Kate was the only medium of the three

(13:29):
Fox sisters who was still holding public seances, Maggie was
submerged in her personal battles, and Leah was floating above
the fray in her newcastle. So as Maggie descended further
into the darkness of alcoholism, Kate extended her earnings to
her sister and supported both of them. But it wasn't
just Maggie who was drinking. Here's more from Nancy Stewart. Maggie,

(13:54):
in midst her breakdowns and so on, after Elisha's death,
finally actually becomes a Catholic, which is interesting. She does
drinking more and more, and by the way, her sister
has become quite a famous and now beautiful, lovely young
woman also is drinking. The two of them are drinking,
and there are various efforts to put them on the wagon,

(14:17):
so to speak. Maggie's case eventually went back to the courts.
When Confederate forces were nearing the Canes estates outside Philadelphia
just before the Battle of Gettysburg, he gave the Canes
more excuses to avoid court dates and payments. Elisha had
been dead for seven years at that point, and yet
she continued to fight and to drink as well. One

(14:42):
night in December of eighteen sixty four, the sister's old friend,
Horace Greeley, who long advocated temperance in his newspapers, found
Maggie wandering drunkenly in the snowy New York street. A
biography published in the nineteen forties recorded that when Horace
asked her what she was doing, she replied, I'm looking
for Elisha. He is somewhere in this awful storm. I

(15:05):
always find him in the snow. When he led her home,
Horace found that Kate was also wrapped in an alcohol addiction.
He put his head together with Leah and the rest
of their family, and they decided to pay for the
sisters to begin a course at a small hospital nearby
called the Swedish Movement Cure Hospital. The founders there practiced
one of the many new attempts at medical treatment that

(15:27):
had sprung up alongside magnetic healing. Here's Nancy Stewarts once again.
Now the Swedish Movement. It was one of those many
And there were many health reform movements going on at
that point of the beginning of the sanitarium movements, or
at least the acceleration of them, and water cures and

(15:47):
diet cures were very popular in the mid nine century.
But anyway, yes, so the Swedish Movement Cure was run
by this doctor George Taylor and his wife Sarah in
New York City end they care for Katie and they
try to keep her sober. The tailor's work focused on
a combination of massage and other techniques for releasing nervous

(16:11):
tension in the body. But even as they worked on Kate,
she worked on them as well. Soon they were calling
her powers of mediumship extraordinary. While Kate was sitting for
their cures, they were sitting for her seances, still clinging
to her dark path. Though Maggie refused both, She was
single minded in her fight with the Canes. That is

(16:33):
until the summer of eighteen sixty five, when her case
was finally decided. The Philadelphia court, where Elisha's family was
deeply involved, came down on the side of the Canes
by throwing out the case altogether. It was the last
thing Maggie and her family needed to hear. In January
of that year, the Fox sisters had lost their father,

(16:53):
then in August their mother had passed away. As you
might imagine, it was difficult for Maggie to find light
in those dark times, but she did brighten a bit
when her book finally reached Prince. At least now people
could read The Love Life of Dr Kane and know
her side of the story. Leah and Daniel Underhill even

(17:14):
decided to fund an apartment for their sisters just a
few blocks away from the Movement Cure Hospital so that
Kate and Maggie could stay together, and it seemed that
maybe things were starting to look up. But when Leah
visited her sisters one morning that summer, she found them
in the midst of a disastrous relapse. Not only had
Maggie resumed holding seances with Kate, finally throwing aside the

(17:37):
religious obedience that had restrained her for so long, but
the pair were also consumed with the destructive spirit of Brandy.
Leah exploded in anger at her sisters. The resulting fight
one where disappointments and resentments were laid bare permanently severed.
The bond between Leah and Maggie and Kate didn't fare

(17:58):
any better either. Her journey from recovery at the hospital
to relapse with Maggie, and then back to the hospital
again would play on repeat for years to come. But
there was something familiar about their struggles. While the Fox
family wrestled with their own demons and failures, an entire
nation was doing the same, and all of them seemed

(18:20):
to be focused on the same three things, promises, betrayal,
and reconciliation. The nation had been reunited, but it was
hardly unified. For some, spirit of liberation, like the figure

(18:44):
of Lincoln was what they needed to lift their downcast eyes.
For others, the loss was far more personal and raw.
They grieved dead sons, nephews, brothers, fathers, and friends. The
war had left many wounds, both the personal and the political.
As it was before the war, the social obligation to

(19:05):
mourn publicly seemed to fall on white, middle class women.
There were expectations about how a grieving woman with some
social clout and some money to her name should act.
At the same time, the whole idea of what a
woman's sphere ought to be was continually changing. Thousands of families,
but especially women, were looking for some kind of guidance

(19:26):
to bring peace to their hearts, and many found that
in spiritualism. So it was only natural that when the
scale of death became unbelievable, it became more and more
possible to see a life beyond death as a reality.
Too many, the spiritualist slogan there is no Death was
a welcome relief. One writer in eighteen sixty seven noted

(19:47):
with surprise that rather than shattering spiritualism and its optimism
for a better world, the number of spiritualists was growing
with each passing day. He wrote, Mothers are losing their
children by death. Fond fathers unwillingly give up their only
son of their name to the grave. Each day, how
many die, some of whom are long and some of

(20:09):
whom are bitterly mourned by the survivors, mourned with blind
longing and passionate pain. And this being so, it is
vain to look for a speedy ending to a belief
that offers the living one more opportunity to speak with
the beloved dead. In fact, the desire was so strong
that the spiritualist newspapers started publishing a new kind of advertisement.

(20:34):
In the years before the war, their pages were full
of notices from mediums offering their services to anyone who
wanted them. In the years after the war, though, we
started to see the reverse letters from grieving families who
wanted help contacting those they've lost. Here's historian Molly McGarry

(20:55):
the spiritualist press. I think that the Schekna is one
of the first spirituals public patients to include pages of
letters from readers to the editor man in Samuel Britten
asking for comfort, asking for consolation, and sometimes asking for
assistance in contacting dead loved ones. So their letters of mourning,

(21:16):
their letters of loss, and there's sometimes letters asking for
help and making his connections. For mediums like Victoria Woodhall,
who had established themselves as spiritual healers, relieving the pain
of wounds opened by massive violence was business and a
lucrative one. When Victoria returned from San Francisco to Ohio
in the years before the war and reunited with her

(21:38):
sister and mother, she was also pulled back into the
surreal world of perpetual cons and frauds that her father,
Buck Claflin, built around his family. She and her sister
Tenny were selling their services as mediums for the cure
of disease, but as far as Victoria could see, there
was a big difference between her approach and what her
father wanted. She laid of wrote, I believe that Tenny

(22:02):
ought to use the gift God has given her, but
not in the mercenary way. She was forced to use it,
and it's easy to understand what she meant. Mary Gabriel
writes that Claflin crew picked the bones of the border
states after waves of violence from the war. They sold
hope to the hopeless so often that even though Victoria
had come back from the West to be with them,

(22:24):
she couldn't always stand to be around them for long,
which is why Victoria wasn't with her family for one
of their most egregious crimes. That was when Buck arrived
in Ottawa, Illinois, not far from where I grew up
in fact, and announced himself as Dr. RB Claflin, King
of Cancers. He rented out the entire Fox River House,

(22:45):
the town's oldest hotel, to establish an infirmary there. Buck
and Tenny dosed patients with their classic life elixir, just
as they've done before, but of course it did nothing
for their dying victims. In fact, the mixture of sheep's fats,
lie and perfumes actually deepened their suffering. Once, when Victoria

(23:06):
came to visit her family, she heard the screams of
a patient and examine their wounds under the bedclothes. She
saw ragged flesh dissolved away from limbs covered in blood
and puss. They were essentially being chemically melted by Buck's poisons.
When Victoria confronted him about what he was doing, he said,
there are only three cures for cancer. Cut it out,

(23:29):
poison it with arsenic or burn it out, and I
burn it. Despite the horrors of the life elixir that
Bucks sold in her name, stories of Tenny's ability to
diagnose wounds, cure illnesses, and even relay the details of
how they occurred continued to be spread by local newspapers.
As Ever, the claim was that the spirits poured their

(23:50):
power through the young woman. Bucks advertisements made it clear
that Tenny was the only one who administered the elixir,
which is why when their patient died in June of
eighteen sixty four, word reached the Claflands that it was
Tenny who would face charges for manslaughter. It wasn't the
first time the law came down on Buck, and he

(24:10):
knew how to slip away from the consequences of a
serious crime. Before the authorities could arrive, he bundled the
family back onto the road and fled towards the horizon.
They were headed east towards Cincinnati, but Victoria was about
to face her own challenges to the west. In the
city of St. Louis. In fact, her life was about

(24:32):
to change forever. Whatever power was inside Victoria, it could
defeat death. She had seen it save her own son.
As she told the story, there was a day when

(24:52):
Victoria had left her son, Byron, with his father, but
when she came home, she found that Canning had vanished
from the house. In his place, she found her mother there,
deeply upset. She told Victoria that Byron had suffered a sudden,
intense fever. It had burned the boy up from the
inside and killed him two hours before Victoria came home.

(25:14):
Victoria remembered screaming, I will not permit his death. But
then she grabbed Byron and held him in her arms,
and then she fell into a trance. The ceiling of
the room disappeared from view, she later wrote, and the
form of the Savior descended. Victoria and her son were
frozen in place for seven hours. When she finally came

(25:35):
back to herself, Byron was breathing again. Whatever disease had
pulled him into death and had given him up again.
From that day on, Victoria said she was convinced that
divine favor was on her side. A divine power that
could work through her to heal and comfort others with
hopeless wounds. If she could heal where others could only despair,

(25:56):
then it was her responsibility to share those gifts with others.
And it was the trail of that healing work that
brought her to St. Louis. Here's author Mary Gabrielle So.
In the years after the civil or, Victoria was found
herself in St. Louis at one period, which was a
really interesting place for her to be because it was
kind of a hub of spiritualism, but it was also

(26:17):
a hub of radicalism. There were a lot of German immigrants,
and one of the things that happened after was that
a lot of the people who fled the conflicts in
Europe landed in the United States, and a lot of
the German radicals surprisingly went to St. Louis. So Victoria
found herself in this kind of stew of people who
were engaged in spiritualism but also political reform, and she

(26:40):
got her first kind of introduction to revolutionary politics there.
But at Victoria had started to absorb the attitudes of liberation,
they took on a less abstract face. When a charming
man with a military bearing and piercing black eyes walked
into the hotel room where she was holding seances. From
the moment they met, it was clear that he had

(27:01):
everything Victoria's husband, Canning lacked. His name was James Harvey Blood.
At just twenty nine, he was an ambitious man. He
was the city auditor, the president of the St. Louis Railroad,
and the founding secretary of the St. Louis Society of Spiritualists.
Victoria would soon learn just how well connected James was too.

(27:23):
He came from an old family whose history on American
soil ran back to a Massachusetts landing in sixteen seventeen,
and in the previous decade his St. Louis circle had
hosted the most prominent spiritualists in the nation, including Emma Harding,
Cora Hatch, and Andrew Jackson Davis. But she learned that
his beautiful body carried the scars of bullet wounds that

(27:45):
would plague him for the rest of his life. His
stepson would later say that he saw five scars on
james body, although his military record only mentioned one, and
ever since returning from the war, James had suffered from
intense headaches, shooting pain in his chest, and partial paralysis
in one arm from the mini ball that had burrowed
into his left shoulder. Over time, James would learn Victoria's

(28:09):
story as well, but he knew from their first meeting
that he had found a great talent, as he wrote,
and in him, Victoria had finally met her match. By
the end of their first seance, the spirit spoke through
Victoria and told James Harvey Blood that the two of
them were going to get married. The trouble was they
were both already married to other people, and they both

(28:31):
had children. But many spiritualists believed that everyone had natural
mates and sympathetic souls waiting for them, and that those
spiritual affinities mattered much more than any other kind of agreement, personal, legal,
or otherwise. And then there was Victoria's view that marriage
was little more than a prison. Here's Mary Gabriel once again.

(28:55):
She thought that all social problems were rooted in bad marriages,
and so Blood. Luckily for Victoria, who probably blood was
probably kind of swept away by her as she was
by him, left the room and agreed it was. In
a very short time they had each left their respective
spouses and went traveling together in a caravan which was
basically kind of a getting to know each other trip.

(29:19):
Following the spirit's encouragement, Victoria and James discovered they were
a match made in heaven, so they continued Victoria's trade
as a traveling medium, adding James to the mix. His spirits,
though spoken, the voice of reform, just as they had
to sojourn her truth Amy Post and the Sir Harmonique
in New Orleans. One writer called him an extreme radical

(29:40):
of the most uncompromising type. He was a zealous advocate
of women's rights, abolition, and labor reform. She worked as
a spiritualist, but it was it was a completely different
environment from anything she had experienced before. There was a
freedom to their relationship and an intellectual change that she

(30:01):
had never had with anyone. And I think that this
was the moment when Victoria Woodhall as we came to
know her, as as the world came to know her,
was born and and actually Blood was her first teacher.
When Victoria stepped out with James Blood, she was still
calling herself a healer, and this time it was maybe
more true than at any other point in the past

(30:23):
five years. Without her father's schemes, placebos and outright poisons
rattling on the margins of every seance. Victoria was able
to give her full attention to her clients and the spirits,
and those clients paid for nothing but her time, her words,
and her sympathetic ear. From our vantage point today, it's
easy to see her work as something like psychotherapy. But

(30:46):
while the physical wounds of war were terrible, Victoria was
most haunted by the stories she heard from women whose
lives sounded so much like her own. Victoria would go
on to spend the coming decades writing down accounts of
abuse of marriages and terrorized wise women who hated their
husbands but were forced into sex and motherhood. They didn't

(31:06):
want young women who were abandoned to fend for themselves,
And in all these dark mirrors Victoria saw the suffering
of her own life reflected back. Perhaps that's why it
didn't take much encouragement from James for Victoria to turn
her talents away from personal consultations. She had started thinking
about how a larger platform as a spiritualist might give

(31:29):
her the chance to fight for the rights of all women.
As a former army officer, James could see it too.
The fight for reform would indeed be a battle necessary
but difficult, and Victoria, he believed, would lead the charge.

(31:55):
Sojourner Truth didn't need introductions. The fight for liberation had
and her life's work for decades. In eighteen sixty two,
she had returned home to Michigan after a brutal tour
through Indiana in which her rallies for abolition were opposed
at every step by increasingly vigorous mobs. But at the
age of sixty five, the tour had taken its toll,

(32:17):
and she was spent. By the end of the year,
she was dangerously ill, and worrying about the possible outcomes
of the war left her in a constant state of anxiety.
She knew the stakes, of course, she had spent her
life in a spiritual battle that had now crossed over
into the world of flesh and blood. Her family and
friends feared that she would die before the end of

(32:37):
the year. In the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation in
January of eighteen sixty three, some of Sojourners friends, especially
among the Quakers, started a campaign of support for her.
Letters and packages started to arrive at her home in
Battle Creek, Michigan, Some from as far away as Ireland.

(32:57):
The encouragement brought by the Emancipation Nation was a wind
under her wings. As she rallied out of her sickness,
Sojourner began to send her own gifts in return. Cards
with her photograph were mailed to people who would otherwise
never have the chance to meet her face to face.
But the Emancipation Proclamation was also met with a fierce backlash,

(33:19):
including waves of violence in Detroit that targeted the city's
black community and well known abolitionists. In response, Sojourner's grandson, James,
joined up with two sons of Frederick Douglas, along with
many other young men, to join the First Northern Black Regiment.
Newspapers that had previously reported on Sojourner and Truth were

(33:39):
now also including stories about Harriet Tubman and other black abolitionists.
But if this newfound interest among white media raised sojourners spirits,
word that James had been lost in combat would have
dashed them to pieces. And then there were the reports
that racist violence was devastating the black community in New
York City, in the very same neighbor hood where Sojourner

(34:01):
had once lived and worked. Some city leaders had shifted
from calls for a secession to outrighte permission for white
people to attack their black neighbors. So Journer knew that
she needed to get back in the fight. She gathered
her strength and left Michigan behind, taking to the road again.
Despite her recent illness about that journey, she wrote, I

(34:21):
mean to live till I am a hundred years old
if it please God, and see my people all free,
rather than join a black regiment. Though she set out
in eighteen sixty four for Washington. On the way, she
stopped in Rochester and stayed with Amy and Isaac post.
Amy organized the lecture during her visit, and Sojourner and
Frederick Douglas spoke together from the same platform once again.

(34:46):
When she reached the capital, Sojourner met Lincoln and spoke
in churches throughout the city. Before she traveled to the
refugee camps. She found that the people who had freed
themselves from captivity and come north were now subject to
the whims of employers who would all for them jobs
but then refused to pay. When they weren't fighting bad bosses,
they were taking government projects that paid months late. So

(35:09):
so a journal came up with a plan. She started
writing to Amy Post to coordinate deliveries of clothes, betting,
and medicine to the Freedman's Village and asked for Amy
to send back word for opportunities for schooling and jobs
across her network. Here's historian Margaret Washington. She was a
counselor Freedman's Village for about a year and a half

(35:32):
and that was important. That was when Freedman's Village they
built homes. Sojourn her truth set up a church. She
asked people congressmen to come when they had celebrations, and
they would they would come and uh and see the
progress that the freed people were making. In fact, Sojourner

(35:52):
received an official appointment as counselor to the freed people
at Freedman's Village when it was established on land that
had been part of Robert Elise Arlington estate. She stayed
there until eighteen sixty five, when bills forming the Freedman's
Bureau and the Freedman Savings Bank seemed to secure the
new status of freedom for black Americans. Here's Margaret Washington

(36:13):
once again. So she stayed there for a year and
a half and then she went to help with Josephine
in the city in Washington City. I think that's where
she really thrived because she taught sewing and other domestic
arts to the women. Then she went to Freedman's Hospital

(36:34):
and worked at Freedman's Hospital, which was going to become
Howard University's medical school. She did that for a year
and a half. At the same time she is along
with Josephine, setting up this employment office. I just found
that was that was just so fascinating. All that while

(36:55):
she stayed in touch with her network of spiritualist friends,
Man continued to work together with a Post. Amy and Isaac,
for their part, kept their arms open in Rochester. So
in eighteen sixty six, when Sojourner traveled with over one
forty freed people to western New York, Amy and the
community in Rochester were waiting for them, and she was

(37:15):
occasionally joined at the Relief Association headquarters by other spiritualists
who traveled to Washington to assist in the work in
the years after the Civil War that included Cora Hatch.
In fact, her mutual friendship with Amy Post was only
one of the connections that formed a bond between her
and Sojourner truth. They met in the eighteen fifties. In

(37:40):
the book, I talked about this abolitionist singing group, the Hutchinson's.
The Hutchinsons were the most popular folk singers in America,
but they were also radical abolitionists. They were good friends
of Sojourners. They spent a lot of time at Northampton.
There's one abbey. Abbey was a spiritualist, and Abby had

(38:03):
Cora Hatch at her house a lot. Cora and so
Journer met at Abby Hudginson's home. They met there several
times that I've found because when so Journer was after
she got well and she said, I'm determined to go
to Washington and see the freedom of my people. She
stayed with Abby Hutchinson and Cora was also there. Then

(38:25):
Cora went to Washington until Journer was there. While she
worked alongside so Journer in Washington, Cora also stayed in
touch with Amy Post. She wrote a letter to Rochester
saying that important things are happening here at the Freedman's Village,
laboring together to bring a new world into being. Both

(38:46):
women would eventually move from the Freedman's Hospital to the
black churches growing around Washington, and in doing so they
would weave together the ultimate spiritualist vision, making the world
new again. A familiar figure stepped onto the New Orleans docks.

(39:12):
She had once been Cora Scott, and then for a
long while Cora Hatch. All along she had won praise
for her beautiful curls and the power and intellect of
the spirits who spoke through her. Now, in May of
eighteen sixty seven, she was Cora Daniels. No longer the
little girl from Wisconsin, or even the unfortunate young wife

(39:34):
of a selfish promoter. Cora now stood in New Orleans
as the wife of Nathan W. Daniels. He was the
man who had served as the commanding officer for the
Louisiana Native Guards during the war before being discharged for
defending them against racist white officers, and he'd sat for
seances with Henri and the members of his Sir Carmonique

(39:55):
when he returned to the North. Nathan was among those
spiritualists who had been invited to the White House to
attend a seance with Mary Lincoln, even though he had
never met the president. But it was all worth it
because he met someone better, a beautiful spiritualist medium who
was working with her friends to build the world of
radical equality that the spirits cried out for Cora. Their

(40:17):
record of sciences held during their time in Washington shows
just how close Cora had become to the capital's spiritualists,
including Neddie Colburn, Giles Stebbins, who had been converted by
sojourn or truth at Northampton, and a nurse named Clara Barton,
whose experiences during the war would lead her to create
the American Red Cross. When Cora and Nathan arrived in

(40:39):
New Orleans, they carried new life with them. Their infant daughter, Henrietta,
and Nathan had been appointed to a government post in
the city. Together, they believed they would bring hope to
a place Nathan loved. He was eager to do some good.
Just like James Blood, Nathan was a man ready to
put his courage and vigor toward the cause of rebuild

(41:00):
holding a just and equitable society, this time with his
wife and daughter beside him. Cora spent most of her
time caring for Henrietta, but her experience as a spiritualist
and connection to the former members of the Native Guard
eventually earned her an invitation to speak. In response, she
set pen to paper to write a memorial poem. It

(41:22):
was meant to be a spirit inspired accompaniment for the
ringing of funeral bells, a harsh reality for so many
people after the war. But those funeral bells would soon
be ringing much louder than she expected, louder and far
too close to home. That's it for this week's episode

(41:46):
of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for
a preview of what's in store for next week. Next
time on Unobscured. If the early seances portrayed Native spirits
as guides and healers for white spiritualists, the tone changed

(42:06):
as reports of more violence reached seance circles in the East.
When murdered leaders arrived to speak at seance tables. During
the reports of genocide and dispossession of the eighteen sixties
and seventies, Indian blessings on spiritualists were replaced by Indian curses,
curses on a nation whose soldiers and citizens had murdered them.

(42:28):
But as other newspapers fell in line with the white
supremacist rhetoric of writers who pushed the idea of manifest destiny,
the Banner of Light continued to print criticisms of that message.
It was their responsibility to heed the voices of the spirits,
after all, and report their messages to the reading public.
Something was happening. Spiritualists who had viewed slavery as a

(42:51):
sin that left a stain on the nation had begun
to see America's westward advancement into the territory of the
Native Americans as just more of the same. Their editorials
called u S policy a fraud and a swindle at
a time when few other voices would. As violence piled
on violence. Cora and the radical politicians who heeded her

(43:12):
spirits were sure that this was just one more way
that the nation needed to be knocked down and made
new again. But to take those stains away, they needed
more than hope. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky

(43:43):
and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane
in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing for
this season is all the work of my right hand man,
Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand
new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians. Source materi
a real and links to our other shows over at
history unobscured dot com and until next time, thanks for listening.

(44:15):
Unobscured is a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Menkey.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.