Abstract
The title of this chapter comes from the famous spiritualist denial of the existence of death. The kind of dispelling of belief implied by this claim is particularly striking when it is considered that spiritualism gained new adherents at key moments of trauma associated with widespread levels of death—notably, the period of the Civil War in the United States, and the 1914–1918 war. At each of these moments there was a revival of interest in the spirit world.1 What are the difficulties, or even the opportunities, faced by a system of beliefs that denies the existence of death when confronted with the devastation it causes?
Keywords
- Dead Body
- Bereave Family
- Spirit World
- Firm Believer
- Spiritualist Culture
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Buying options
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For more on this see Lisa A. Long, Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Emma Hardinge [Britten], The Great Funeral Oration on Abraham Lincoln (New York: American News Company, [1865]), 7.
Susan-Mary Grant, “Patriot Graves: American National Identity and the Civil War Dead,” American Nineteenth-Century History 5, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 95–96.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Three Spiritualist Novels (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), ix–x.
A similarly materialist version of heaven is represented in a recent best-selling novel, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002). Like Phelps’ works, it is not spiritualist but bears a strong relationship to ideas within spiritualist thought.
An interesting discussion of issues of materiality and embodiment in the novel is in Laura E. Tanner, Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 215–19. Lucy Frank’s fine unpublished essay “Bought with a Price: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and the Commodification of Heaven” addresses the relationship within the novel of mourning and commodity culture.
Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (London: Penguin, 1986), 825.
See, for instance, Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 169–71.
Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 2, 93.
See, for instance, Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 88–89.
Francis Grierson [Benjamin Henry Jesse Francis Shepard], Abraham Lincoln: The Practical Mystic (London: John Lane, 1919);
Harriet M. Shelton, Abraham Lincoln Returns (New York: Evans, 1957);
Nettie Colburn Maynard, Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist? or, Curious Revelations from the Life of a Trance Medium (Philadelphia: Rufus C. Hartranft, 1891).
Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 2:261.
For further details of her involvement with spiritualism, see Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), especially 217–22;
and Mark E. Neely, Jr., and R. Gerald McMurtry, The Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.).
William H. Mumler, The Personal Experiences of William H Mumler in Spirit-Photography (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1875), 4.
William Lloyd Garrison, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 6 vols., ed. Walter M. Merrill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Letter to Helen E. Garrison and children, December 10, 1861, 5:61–62. See also 5:100.
Cited in William W. Betts, Jr., ed., Lincoln and the Poets (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1965), 16–17. Emphasis original.
This image (held in a private collection) is reproduced in Dan Meinwald, Memento Mori: Death in Nineteenth Century Photography (Riverside: California Museum of Photography, 1990), 27. The process of commodifying Lincoln’s memory bears a relation to the commodofication of battlegrounds and what they represent.
See, for example, Jim Weeks, “Gettysburg: Display Window for Popular Memory,” Journal of American Culture 21, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 41–56.
Cited in Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes towards Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 142. Emphasis original.
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Penguin, 1989), 419.
Laderman, The Sacred Remains, 130. The same kind of difficulty, Nancy Miller argues, was experienced by those trying to memorialize those killed in the Twin Towers. See Nancy Miller, “‘Portraits of Grief’: Telling Details and the Testimony of Trauma,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2003): 112–35.
Emma Hardinge Britten, Autobiography of Emma Hardinge Britten, ed. Margaret Wilkinson (Manchester: John Heywood, 1900), 205.
Roy P. Basler, ed., Walt Whitman’s Memoranda During the War and Death of Abraham Lincoln (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), 3. Unless otherwise noted, the pagination here refers to that of Whitman’s reading copy of the text which Basier reproduces. Emphasis original.]
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (lines 505–518), in Francis Murphy, ed., Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1975), 86–87.
On the death of Princess Diana see, for instance, Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg, eds., Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief (London: Routledge, 1999). Queen Victoria tried to contact Prince Albert through mediums following his death. Many mediums claim to have communicated with Princess Diana following her death in 1997.
Michael C. Kearl, Endings: A Sociology of Death and Dying (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 307.
Karla F. C. Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 178.
Robert Bellah and Phillip Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), x, cited in Kearl, Endings, 303.
Copyright information
© 2007 Bridget Bennett
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bennett, B. (2007). “There Is No Death“: Spiritualism and the Civil War. In: Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604865_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604865_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53804-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-60486-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)