'In 1850s Vermont, Achsa Sprague swore that the spirits who miraculously helped her walk again also possessed her with a crucial mission: freeing every soul in America.' MsReads via Narratively
woman with dark, glossy hair and sharp cheekbones stood confidently under a tent with her eyes closed. About a thousand convention-goers waited for her to speak, standing patiently or sitting on the grass. Five full minutes ticked by on the timepiece the organizers had provided to keep the convention schedule on track. Still she stood there with her eyes closed, and the crowd waited.
Angels and spirits were credited with acting through mediums who painted, sang, recited poetry, wrote, lectured and took daguerreotype photographs under their influence. Freedom and the shedding of chains were popular Spiritualist themes, particularly of Sprague’s. “Shall any say, ‘Let the captive go free, burst the gyves [shackles] from the slaves, take poverty away from the world, let every one be blest with enough and to spare, let ignorance be enlightened, in this world, before we raise the question of the immortality of the human soul?’
“The soul, set free from its bondage, hears the clanking of the chains of the prisoner and of the slave with harsher discord than ever before,” Sprague said, implying that the most noble souls are prison reformers and abolitionists. Plymouth had no high school. Students in the region who continued their studies after primary school traveled to a larger town, living with a local family during the week.Two years later, Sprague began writing a journal or diary in an unadorned black notebook, which is known mostly from the excerpts Twynham published in a 1941 issue of the.
Sprague lived just before the era of modern medical science. Aspirin would be invented in Germany in 1897 to treat the pain of what was still commonly known as “rheumatism” without damaging the heart or stomach, as preparations of its active ingredient from willow bark and other plants sometimes did. The anti-inflammatory and disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs used to treat rheumatoid arthritis today wouldn’t be developed until a century later.
She sought treatment, first from doctors nearby, then from others farther away. Her first train trip was to Keene, New Hampshire, about 60 miles away, to visit a Dr. Gwitchell. She also paid a Dr. Spencer $15 for medicine and several visits, about $400 today. Later, she explored alternative treatments. She wore galvanic, or electric, bands for six weeks. She saw a psychologist who “magnetized” her twice a day. In the 19th century, magnetism was both common and controversial.
She was not the first person to come to Spiritualism through recovery. “Illness was a common, although not normative, precondition of mediumship,” Braude writes in. “Sprague’s experience suggests that Spiritualism may have been made more attractive by the failure of other sources of healing.
On November 19, 1855, after marveling that she had just walked a mile and a half, she wrote, “Is it possible that I am the same being who three years ago lay in a dark room in pain & anguish with no hope of relief?” Sprague credited her improved health to “this change wrought by my Spirit Friends.” Now in remission, Sprague began traveling across the Northeast for paid engagements to give trance lectures. She became known as “the preaching woman,” Twynham writes.
Famous women’s rights advocate and abolitionist Lucretia Mott was one of 11 white women to form the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, along with Sarah Mapps Douglass , one of seven Black women founders. The women created the society in 1833, after they were shut out of other abolitionist groups because of their gender.
These ideas were radical in 1858, and they remained radical enough that marital rape or spousal rape did not become illegal in all 50 states until 1993. At the Rutland convention, Julia Branch of New York spoke about a woman’s “right to love, when she will, where she will, and how she will.
“Miss Sprague seated herself upon the platform,” Twynham quotes from a less flattering report of one of her Milwaukee lectures. “After wringing her palms and passing them slowing across her face for a few moments, she rose with eyes closed and commenced her lecture. It was spoken in a clear, distinct, but not by any means pleasant voice. … The subject was the same pointless collection of beautiful abstractions which it has ever been our misfortune to listen to when Trance Speaking was announced.
This time, the money she earned from her trance lectures bought her some freedom while she was ailing. Several accounts, including the 1980 book, by Jean K. Smith, state that Sprague dictated poems and letters to an assistant during this period of illness. Smith writes: “Occasionally she would pace the room, dictating with such rapidity that her amanuensis could barely keep up with the flow of words.
Even now, with improved modern medicine, studies show that rheumatoid arthritis can shorten a person’s lifespan by an average of 10 years. Typically, it’s the complications that often come with the disease that are the cause of death, including increased risks of heart disease, lymphoma and lung scarring. Sprague’s death may be an example of this.
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