Talking to the Dead (5 page)

Smaller religious groups, including the Shakers and the Community of the Publick Universal Friend, also established sites for their members in western New York. Jemima Wilkinson, a woman known as the Publick Universal Friend, like Mother Ann Lee of the Shakers was believed by her followers to embody a divine spirit.

Of more enduring significance than the Friend, in the 1820s an entirely new religion was born in Palmyra, New York, a town only ten miles from Hydesville, when the young visionary Joseph Smith claimed
to discover two golden tablets on a hilltop near his home. The angel Moroni, Smith reported, had sent the tablets, which contained new revelations. Although no one except Smith ever saw the tablets, his assertions and teachings led to the formation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the members of which are popularly known today as Mormons.

Revivalism and millennialism—the belief that the judgment day approached—in time helped transform the political and social landscape. The temperance movement was one of the earliest and most influential offshoots of revivalism. From camp meetings to temperance halls, speakers denounced the evils of strong drink. Conversion didn't always prevent backsliding, but the message of abstinence spread.

Some revivalist preachers, such as the charismatic Presbyterian minister Charles Grandison Finney, while often provoking ecstatic conversions, emphasized above all the life of good deeds. What better way to demonstrate godliness than by improving, not only oneself, but also one's neighbors and the rest of society? In 1830 a zealous church deacon and prosperous businessman named Josiah Bissell invited the Reverend Finney to Rochester to instill godly virtues in its citizens. A six-month revival took place during the winter of 1830–31 that created thousands of new converts. By that time, temperance reform had also become a crusade.

 

Bringing to an end an estrangement that had lasted more than a decade, Margaret Fox reunited with her now devout and sober husband, and the middle-aged couple went on to have what amounted to a second family. Their two youngest daughters, Margaretta and Catherine, were born in Canada, just across Lake Ontario from western New York.

The girls might have emerged from the ether, like spirits, for all that's definitively known about their childhood. Controversy exists even about their years of birth. But one of Maggie's late-in-life friends, a bookseller named Titus Merritt, maintained that she had been born on October 7, 1833, and that Kate had followed three and a half years later, on March 27, 1837.
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Kate and Maggie were raised in or near Consecon, a tiny village in Prince Edward County, Ontario, where John was said to have owned a
farm. As late as the 1870s the village's population consisted only of about four hundred people, but Consecon lay just across the beautiful Bay of Quinte from the more populous town of Belleville, where some members of the Ruttan family had settled. It's possible that John and Margaret moved to Canada at the urging of the Ruttans, who by now were members of the United Empire Loyalists, an unofficial aristocracy comprised of early settlers who had left America to fight for the British during the Revolution.
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By the 1830s many more Americans were heading for Canada, both in search of new opportunities and to escape economic depression in their own country. But the life of a farmer in Canada was hard, perhaps even more so than in western New York. Someone unaccustomed to daunting physical labor, warned Susanna Moodie, a British settler who wrote about Canadian life in the 1830s, faced formidable obstacles.

“The task is new to him…” Moodie said, describing the ordeals of ill-prepared sons of English aristocrats in a comment that certainly bore relevance to reformed alcoholic blacksmiths: “Difficulties increase, debts grow upon him, he struggles in vain to extricate himself, and finally sees his family sink into hopeless ruin.”
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For children, isolation must have been the norm. Education was intermittent, depending on the proximity of a schoolhouse and the ferocity of the weather. Moodie's husband wrote a humorous ditty describing their own family's first cold winter night, ending with the line “It's at zero without, and we're freezing within.”

Perhaps the farm failed, or family ties and new opportunities called John and Margaret back to the United States, for in the 1840s they returned to Rochester, leaving one daughter behind in her adopted homeland: Elizabeth, who married a Canadian named Osterhout.

 

The Fox family's name reappears in the public records in 1841, when John and his father-in-law, Jacob, jointly purchased a large plot in Rochester's beautiful new cemetery, Mount Hope, paying five dollars to secure a spot in one of the more picturesque sections. In 1842 Margaret's brother, John J. Smith, deeded land in Wayne County, New York, to his nephew David Fox.
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The family remained in transit and upheaval. In 1844 John's name was listed in Rochester's street directory as a blacksmith and as a resident of “South Sophia Street near Clarissa.” That year Maria Smith, Margaret's mother, died and was buried in the plot that John and Jacob had purchased in Mount Hope.
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The next year, 1845, John's name vanished from the directory, but David's replaced it at the same address. A young confectioner named Calvin Brown, who had been adopted informally as a second son by the Fox family after the death of his own parents, lived with David. Jacob Smith most likely resided there as well until his death in 1846; then he was buried with his wife.

In the 1840s Rochester was a very different place from the freewheeling canal town of Leah's childhood. Regular doses of piety, a legacy from the revivals held in the early 1830s by the Reverend Finney, had chastened it, and the fruits of commerce and industry had enriched it. With the success of the canal and the rise of the railroad, so many new residents had arrived that builders were struggling to keep up, replacing older homes with a new generation of Rochester's standard two-story frame houses and constructing a formidable abundance of churches.
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Modest homes, moreover, now stood in the company of elegant brick mansions and fashionable cottages, for the well-to-do were enjoying what their money could buy. Skilled craftsmen carved ornate tables and settees for the parlor. Stores advertised expensive goods imported from the East Coast and Europe: hats, furs, mantillas, lace, gloves, wigs, and luxurious fabrics. Factory owners, shopkeepers, artisans, and professionals prospered.
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Particularly among the well-to-do, changes had also taken place in the patterns of family life. As elsewhere around the nation, there was a growing divide between the sexes. In the past, with farmers' fields and artisans' shops adjacent to the home, husbands and wives had spent their days in close proximity to one another. But with the rise of a market economy, men increasingly went out to a place of business, while women—if their husbands and fathers could afford the luxury—remained behind, symbols of feminine purity and guardians of the domestic sphere, with its attendant religious and moral values.

The middle-class family, with its separate spheres for women and men, had emerged as an influential ideal, a model for the practice of genteel conduct and the nurturing of sentimental attachments and personal feelings. Even the focus of courtship and marriage, in the wake of the Romantic movement, had shifted from economic bonds to emotional ties. Children too were being viewed less as an economic asset—or liability—than as a treasure to be cherished. In families with money, young people were marrying later and were protected longer from the vicissitudes of the world.

Of course, not everyone shared equally in the city's bounty or nestled in the bosom of a middle-class home. Industrialization in Rochester, as elsewhere, was creating social divisions. The town that had first attracted farmers, merchants, artisans, and shopkeepers now had its share of mills, tanneries, foundries, breweries, and furniture and clothing factories. Immigrant women, as well as daughters uprooted from their fathers' farms, often found work either as domestics or in the clothing and shoe industries, sometimes toiling in the factories but usually doing piecework at home for long hours and at low pay. In 1851 Horace Greeley estimated in the
New York Tribune
that a family of five in an urban area needed a weekly income of $10.37 to cover food, rent, clothing, and fuel. With women textile workers making about $3.00 a week, and men double that, often whole families, children included, worked just to afford the necessities for survival.
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Laborers, male and female, found themselves increasingly segregated in overcrowded neighborhoods where unsanitary conditions exacerbated health hazards and the risk of rapidly spreading epidemics such as cholera.

 

If Rochester, at least among some segments of society, had become a more polite town, the Burned-over District, the region that surrounded it and that had been the scene of earlier revivals, continued to smolder with enthusiasms both religious and political. A Vermont preacher, William Miller, prophesying that Christ would come sometime between March 1843 and March 1844, enthralled disciples among western New Yorkers, until the dates came and went with the world unchanged.
Enclaves called
phalanxes,
experiments in communal living based on the ideas of the French social philosopher Charles Fourier, caught fire and burned brightly, if in most cases briefly. The religious community of Oneida, founded on the principles of a former theology student named John Humphrey Noyes, supported “complex marriage,” a system in which all community members were married to one another. In western New York, the time was always right for a new philosophy, theory, controversy, or utopia.

Rochester itself crackled with intellectual energy. The nationwide emphasis on self-improvement, in part a secular offshoot of earlier revivals, motivated young and old alike to attend lectures and programs on art, music, history, and literature. In a technological age that seemed to produce new scientific wonders every day, crowds swamped demonstrations of newfangled inventions, the telegraph among them.

Newspapers and lecturers carried word of promising new theories such as phrenology, which preached that an individual's personality could be ascertained by the shape of his or her head. Each area of the brain, phrenologists asserted, not only produced a distinctive lump on the skull but also corresponded to a specific character trait. Experts in the field drew segmented diagrams to illustrate their points and probed for revelatory lumps on the heads of volunteers.

In the midst of the ferment of ideas, Rochester had also become a vital hub of political and social reform, home to an informal network of men and women avidly devoted to abolition and woman suffrage. Frederick Douglass, the former slave who had become a noted author and abolitionist lecturer, established his newspaper in Rochester. He named it the
North Star
for the celestial beacon that helped guide enslaved African Americans north to freedom. As elsewhere in the North, stations on the Underground Railroad were proliferating. The zeal that had infused religious revivals, that aimed to perfect self and society, easily translated to impassioned politics.

Kate and Maggie were exposed to the excitement, for the girls and their parents lived for a while at the home of an activist Quaker couple, Amy and Isaac Post, in the Cornhill section of Rochester. Whether or
not the Fox family boarded with the Posts or simply rented the house from them, Amy and Isaac knew the girls well enough to enjoy what he called “good understanding” with them.

The Posts were about five years younger than John and Margaret. Amy's face was serious and her body lean; she was altogether as angular in appearance as Margaret Fox was round. Isaac, the proprietor of a drugstore, had a craggy face softened by an almost beatifically sweet expression.
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Amy and Isaac must have been compelling figures to Kate and Maggie. The Posts were among the city's—and the nation's—most dedicated and intrepid reformers. Quakers held that each individual possessed an inner light or spark of the divine. The Posts, in a radical version of this faith, supported political and social activism in accordance with the dictates of personal conscience. Their home—the Cornhill house, as well as the address to which they moved after 1846—served as a magnet for abolitionists, woman's suffrage advocates, religious radicals, and utopian visionaries.

 

By the time Kate and Maggie met the spirits in March 1848, the girls were already familiar with what it meant to encompass and mediate between different worlds. They were Canadian, and they were American. Some of their old friends across Lake Ontario in Prince Edward County probably thought the American Revolution should never have been fought.

The girls had lived on a farm, then in a city, and then returned to rural life. They were deeply attached to both John and Margaret, but they surely felt the tensions between their parents, perhaps even becoming go-betweens or conciliators.

The children had relatives, such as their uncle John J. Smith, who had achieved a secure middle-class niche amid the flux of the times, but their own immediate family's financial and social status remained unstable and shifting. Their father's aspirations had come to nothing. Success had eluded him, as both a farmer and blacksmith.

Kate and Maggie knew strong and outgoing women: Leah, for example, had managed as a single mother to raise a child under unorthodox circumstances, and the astonishing Amy Post was transforming society.
But the girls were also growing up at a time when proper people, genteel ones, valued passivity and domestic grace in their daughters.

They had already been exposed to a strange and thrilling potpourri of ideas. At their mother's knee, they had heard shivery tales of second sight. They were witnesses to the intensity of their father's Methodist faith and his daily prayers. And when they lived in Rochester, every newspaper, parlor, and street corner buzzed with talk about mesmerism and phrenology, abolition and suffrage.