American Spirits: Chapters 13–19

Still living at Castle Doleful, fourteen-year-old Kate was steeped in the morbid gloom surrounding Mary Greeley.

It casually addressed them as “Gents” and, in a few ladylike sentences, pushed back publicly for the first time, “we do not feel willing to rest under the imputation of being imposters, we are very willing to undergo a proper and decent examination … We can assure the public that there is no one more anxious than ourselves to discover the origin of these mysterious manifestations.”

Though sectionalism had been growing for decades, by 1851, almost every issue in the country was seen through opposing viewpoints: factory vs. plantation, antislavery vs. proslavery, North vs. South.

Newspaper editors supportive of the spirits ran stories disparaging Chauncey and his brother as “itinerant, catch-penny lecturers,” “dunces” and “accomplished mountebanks.”

By now, the esteemed justice was frenzied, shouting in wonder to the others in the room.

A young woman, with long, dark, shining hair sat in the window engrossed in a book.

Multiple recurrences of the disease kept his heart weak and his health precarious.

Maggie Fox was “joyous,” excellent at “repartee and mimicry.”

As he grew to love Maggie, Elisha disparaged her work more often.

She was a practiced, phenomenal flirt, “Now, Doctor—be candid!—am I not correct when I say you are an enigma past finding out? You know I am.”

Afterward, Leah referred to Elisha as “a vain, pompous little man” and worried about his fascination with her teenage sister.

Maggie primly refused: “The idea seems to me so unbecoming.”

The Second Grinnell Expedition’s “intrepid” crew was under the leadership of what New York’s Daily Herald called, “the indefatigable perseverance and indomitable courage” possessed by its thirty-three-year-old naval surgeon and commander.

A fellow medium described, “poor patient Kate Fox … in the midst of a captious, grumbling crowd … repeating hour after hour the letters of the alphabet …”

Instead, they portrayed Dr. Kane as selflessly helping a young girl rise from her sordid profession by providing a proper education—polishing his image as a kind of super-generous superhero.