Present-day students and scholars of supernatural belief in the United States cannot avoid engaging with the history and legacy of Spiritualism. The iconography of both popular culture and contemporary vernacular religious practices—from popular horror films to ghost-hunting groups to heterodox, unaffiliated practitioners, to say nothing of explicitly Spiritualist organizations—owes much to the emergence in the nineteenth century of Modern American Spiritualism, which, Melissa Daggett notes, was itself “a complex phenomenon whose philosophical roots reached back to Europe in the eighteenth century” (28).
Daggett’s task in this work is to situate the life of Henry Louis Rey, a free person of color, in the context of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans history: “Henry Louis Rey was the quintessential postbellum black political leader. He was thirty-three years old in 1865, French-speaking, a lifetime resident of New Orleans, a Saint-Domingue descendant from an elite Creole family, literate, fair-skinned, and a man who had honed his leadership skills as a captain in the Union Native Guards” (69). He was also a medium, and his communications with the spirit world intersected in complex ways with the other facets of his life.
A main source of information on Rey’s activities are the extensive séance registers maintained by Rey and his fellow spiritualists for a period of almost twenty years, beginning in 1858. Against the backdrop of generalized racial unrest, the transition of the Afro-Creole community from a place of social power and prestige to one of undifferentiated (and despised) blackness after the Civil War, and the development of American Spiritualist practices through the middle of the century, Daggett traces Rey’s story, from his role as a spiritualist medium, a soldier (for both the Confederacy and the Union), an anti-racism activist in the postwar years, to his sad decline and death in a Jim Crow New Orleans quite different from his early days in the Afro-Creole ascendancy.
Daggett’s historical detective work is impressive. Rey’s life story weaves in and out of the local, the national, and the spiritual strands of a larger historical discourse centered on the changing fortunes of free people of color in New Orleans. Spiritualism is less a focus of the work than the title might suggest, but Daggett convincingly connects the movement to politics and race relations in the nineteenth century.
The story of Spiritualism in New Orleans emerges in fits and starts through a bewildering array of personages, events, and politics. Secondary strands discuss Swedenborg, Voodoo, Reconstruction, the Mechanics’ Institute Massacre, the governorship of Henry Clay Warmoth, and any number of other events, people, and political discourses. All of these are undoubtedly necessary to understand Rey’s life and Spiritualism’s role in it, but Rey himself sometimes disappears into the thick of things, as the reader is introduced to one medium, politician, or activist after another.
Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans is ultimately a history not of Spiritualism, and not entirely of Henry Louis Rey. Rather it is a history of New Orleans in several registers: the racial, the spiritual, the sociopolitical. All of these are useful reminders of the broader trajectory of American social and religious history in this troubled period. In her epilogue, Daggett writes, “Henry Louis Rey’s Cercle Harmonique disappeared in 1877, coinciding with the official end of Reconstruction” (149). She notes that this pattern was reflected at the national level, on which Spiritualism was replaced by other emerging religions. Daggett’s major contribution here is precisely this movement between the local and the national, illustrating the need to take seriously “nonmainstream” traditions that intersect in powerfully compelling ways with other aspects of vernacular experience.
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[Review length: 591 words • Review posted on April 19, 2019]