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All Catholics Are Spiritualists: The Boundary Work of Mary Gove Nichols and Thomas Low Nichols

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2018

Jonathan D. Riddle
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Abstract

From the 1840s to the 1870s, the first wave of Spiritualism swept across the Atlantic world. Many social reformers looked to messages from the spiritual realm to bolster their endeavors for this-worldly improvement. The Catholic Church, sensing diabolic powers at work, condemned the movement and its attendant reforms. It therefore surprised many when, in the mid-1850s, the spirits of dead Jesuits prompted Mary Gove Nichols and Thomas Low Nichols—both prominent Spiritualists and reformers—to convert to Catholicism. While the Nicholses are best known for their reform efforts, as their conversions suggest, they also led vibrant religious lives. By charting their religious biographies and using previously neglected writings, this article demonstrates that the Nicholses abandoned neither Spiritualism nor reform upon their conversion. Rather, they argued that both séance supernaturalism and social reformation should be pursued within the Catholic Church. In this way, the Nicholses challenged the church's attempts to demarcate acceptable spirituality, intentionally crossing and blurring received religious boundaries. In doing so, they redefined what it meant to be Catholic in order to accommodate their experiences and commitments. Their story recasts the history of Spiritualism and Catholicism as a boundary contest and provides a detailed case study of the process of religious hybridization.

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Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 87 , Issue 2 , June 2018 , pp. 452 - 486
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2018 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Karie Cross Riddle, Patricia Cline Cohen, Philip Gleason, John McGreevy, Mark Noll, Thomas Tweed, the participants of the 2015 spring meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association, and the journal's anonymous readers for their help with this article. I would also like to thank the archivists at the University of Notre Dame and Vassar College for their assistance in accessing materials.

References

1 “Converts to Catholicism,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 2, 1857. The quotes are from a letter Thomas and Mary wrote detailing their conversion, published as “Letter to Our Friends and Co-Workers,” Catholic Telegraph and Advocate, May 23, 1857, and excerpted in the Tribune. See also Thurston, Herbert, The Church and Spiritualism (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1933), 52–56Google Scholar; and Gleason, Philip, “From Free-Love to Catholicism: Dr. and Mrs. Thomas L. Nichols At Yellow Springs,” The Ohio Historical Quarterly 70, no. 4 (1961): 297–302Google Scholar.

2 Nichols, Thomas Low, Nichols’ Health Manual: Being Also a Memorial of the Life and Work of Mrs. Mary S. Gove Nichols (London: E. W. Allen, 1887), 97Google Scholar. It is not true that the Nicholses knew nothing of Catholic theology. Two years earlier, Thomas published a book on world religions in which he included a brief explication of Catholic doctrines. See Nichols, Thomas Low, Religions of the World: An Impartial History of Religious Creeds, Forms of Worship, Sects, Controversies, and Manifestations, From the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Cincinnati: Valentine Nicholson, 1855), 57–58Google Scholar. Thomas also acquired a Protestant history of the Jesuit order during these spirit visitations. Thurston, The Church and Spiritualism, 54.

3 “Converts to Catholicism,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 2, 1857.

4 “Free Lovers Converted to Catholicism,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 7, 1857.

5 Nichols, Religions of the World, 109. On nineteenth-century discussions of the religious status of Spiritualism, see Walker, David, “The Humbug in American Religion: Ritual Theories of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 23, no. 1 (2013): 30–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Nichols, Thomas Low, Forty Years of American Life, vol. 2 (London: John Maxwell, 1864), 48Google Scholar.

7 Religion per se factors only secondarily in scholarship on the Nicholses, which tends to focus on their social reforms. See, for example, the recent article by Patricia Cohen, Cline, “The ‘Anti-Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols,” Journal of the Early Republic 34, no. 1 (2014): 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The standard works on the Nicholses are Stearns, Bertha-Monica, “Two Forgotten New England Reformers,” The New England Quarterly 6, no. 1 (1933): 59–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blake, John B., “Mary Gove Nichols, Prophetess of Health,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106, no. 3 (1962): 219–234Google Scholar; Janet Hubly Noever, “Passionate Rebel: The Life of Mary Gove Nichols, 1810–1884” (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1983); and Silver-Isenstadt, Jean L., Shameless: The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

Compounding the oversight of the Nicholses’ religion, the couple exists only at the margins of the historiography of Spiritualism and not at all in the historiography of Catholicism. They appear only fleetingly in Moore, R. Laurence, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 44–45Google Scholar, 97; Braude, Ann, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 124–136Google Scholar; Carroll, Bret E., Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 44Google Scholar, 80, 156; Albanese, Catherine L., A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 267Google Scholar; and Lause, Mark A., Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 6Google Scholar, 30, 38. On the British side, the Nicholses do not appear in Oppenheim, Janet, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; but Mary is noticed in Owen, Alex, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 121–123Google Scholar. Franchot, Neither Jenny, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar; nor Allitt, Patrick, Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar mention the Nicholses.

8 Tweed, Thomas A., “Who Is a Buddhist? Night-Stand Buddhists and Other Creatures,” in Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia, ed. Prebish, Charles S. and Baumann, Martin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 18–20Google Scholar.

9 Engler, Steven, “Hybridity,” in Vocabulary for the Study of Religion, vol. 2, ed. Segal, Robert A. and von Stuckrad, Kocku (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 213–214Google Scholar. “The main conceptual leverage that ‘hybridity’ offers,” Engler says, “is to call into question boundaries that have become reified, naturalized, or essentialized in specific historical, social, and cultural contexts.” Ibid., 214. See also Engler, Steven, “Rethinking ‘Hybridity’: Anterior Purities and the ‘Invention of Tradition,’” Religião E Cultura 10 (2006): 9–20Google Scholar.

10 I draw the description of hybridity as “the crossing and blurring of boundaries” from Engler, “Hybridity,” 213.

11 This article attempts to heed Paul Christopher Johnson's pleas for specificity when studying syncretism and hybridity—namely, that “we should distinguish intentional syncretic acts and movements as a form of religious practice from the generic processes of borrowing that characterize all traditions, and all cultural forms”; and that “we should pay attention to the specific forms, processes, and sites of combination.” Johnson, Paul Christopher, “Syncretism and Hybridization,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion, ed. Strausberg, Michael and Engler, Steven (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 766–767Google Scholar.

12 Catherine L. Albanese calls for “attention to choreographies of contact and combination.” Albanese, Catherine L., “Exchanging Selves, Exchanging Souls: Contact, Combination, and American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Tweed, Thomas A. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 225Google Scholar. For examples, see Steven Engler's work on hybridity in Kardecism and Umbanda in Brazil. Engler, Steven, “Umbanda and Hybridity,” Numen 56, no. 5 (2009): 545–577CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Engler, Steven, “Kardecism,” in Spirit Possession around the World: Possession, Communion, and Demon Expulsion across Cultures, ed. Laycock, Joseph P. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2015), 198–201Google Scholar; Engler, Steven, “Umbanda,” in Spirit Possession around the World: Possession, Communion, and Demon Expulsion across Cultures, ed. Laycock, Joseph P. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2015), 357–359Google Scholar; Engler, Steven, “Umbanda,” in Handbook of Contemporary Religions in Brazil, ed. Schmidt, Bettina E. and Engler, Steven (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 204–224Google Scholar; and Engler, Steven and Isaia, Artur Cesar, “Kardecism,” in Handbook of Contemporary Religions in Brazil, ed. Schmidt, Bettina E. and Engler, Steven (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 186–203Google Scholar. Regarding Kardecism and Catholicism, Engler and Isaia note that “the approximation between Roman Catholic and Spiritist beliefs was central to the emergence of Kardecism in Brazil” during the nineteenth century. Engler and Isaia, “Kardecism,” 190.

13 The exception is Aspinwall, Bernard, “Social Catholicism and Health: Dr. and Mrs Thomas Low Nichols in Britain,” in The Church and Healing: Papers Read at the Twentieth Summer Meeting and the Twenty-First Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Sheils, W. J. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 249–270Google Scholar. The Nicholses’ post-conversion lives are treated in the final two chapters of Noever, “Passionate Rebel,” 266–310; and the last chapter and epilogue of Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless, 210–249.

14 Nineteenth-century Spiritualists like Thomas called theirs “modern Spiritualism” in part to distinguish it from ancient and early Christian spiritualisms.

15 Nichols, Religions of the World, 109.

16 Nichols, Thomas Low, “Editorial Miscellany,” Nichols’ Monthly: A Magazine of Social Science and Progressive Literature (November 1854): 66Google Scholar.

17 Nartonis, David K., “The Rise of 19th-Century American Spiritualism, 1854–1873,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 49, no. 2 (2010): 361–373CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Lause, Free Spirits, 14–19.

18 Noakes, Richard, “Spiritualism, Science, and the Supernatural in Mid-Victorian Britain,” in The Victorian Supernatural, ed. Brown, Nicola, Burdett, Carolyn, and Thurschwell, Pamela (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26Google Scholar.

19 Throughout, I draw biographical details for the Nicholses from Stearns, “Two Forgotten New England Reformers”; Noever, “Passionate Rebel”; and Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless; as well as from the Nicholses’ own writings.

20 Nichols, Mary Gove, Mary Lyndon: Or, Revelations of a Life (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1855), 135Google Scholar. On the factuality and context of this autobiography, see Cohen, “The ‘Anti-Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols,” 12–16.

21 Poe, Edgar Allen, “The Literati of New York City,” Godey's Magazine and Lady Book 33, no. 16 (1846): 16Google Scholar. This is also quoted in Blake, “Prophetess of Health,” 226.

22 On the Nicholses’ close collaboration, see Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless, 3–4.

23 Nichols, Mary Lyndon, 69, 67–68.

24 Ibid., 117, 59–83.

25 Cohen, “The ‘Anti-Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols,” 9.

26 Nichols, Mary Lyndon, 166.

27 Ibid., 169.

28 Orme, Mary, “The Gift of Prophecy,” Broadway Journal 2, no. 13 (1845): 187Google Scholar. Mary Orme was one of Mary's pseudonyms. See also [Mary Gove Nichols], “Psychological Experience,” The Spiritual Magazine 4, no. 1 (1863): 13–17. This latter piece was the first in a series of articles in volume 4 of the British Spiritual Magazine signed “M. N.” I identify the author as Mary because of the alignment of several biographical details: she mentioned suffering a lung sickness in the winter of 1837 and 1838; she described a prophetic vision of her life's work in terms similar to those quoted above; she recounted Spiritualist experiences in New York; and she described herself and her husband as physicians. Cohen makes the same identification. Cohen, “The ‘Anti-Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols,” 8n14.

29 Mary Gove Nichols, “A Letter from Mrs. Gove Nichols to Her Friends,” Nichols’ Monthly (November 1854): 67.

30 Mary Gove Nichols, “The Life of a Medium,” Nichols’ Monthly (June 1855): 42.

31 Nichols, “A Letter from Mrs. Gove Nichols,” 67.

32 Nichols, Thomas Low, Journal in Jail, Kept during a Four Months’ Imprisonment for Libel, in the Jail of Erie County (Buffalo: A. Dinsmore, 1840)Google Scholar, 169, 229, 176.

33 Ibid., 36–39.

34 Ibid., 75–76.

35 Ibid., 189, 214.

36 Nichols, Thomas Low, “Oration,” in The Paine Festival: Celebration of the 119th Anniversary of the Birth-Day of Thomas Paine, at Cincinnati, January 29, 1856 (Cincinnati: Valentine Nicholson, 1856), 16Google Scholar, 22. See Schlereth, Eric R., An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 190–200Google Scholar.

37 Nichols, Journal in Jail, 214.

38 Nichols, Forty Years, 2:54–55.

39 Nichols, Nichols’ Health Manual, 93–96.

40 Spurlock, John C., Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825–1860 (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 73–106Google Scholar; Braude, Radical Spirits, 117–141; Cohen, Patricia Cline, “Sex and Sexuality: The Public, the Private, and the Spirit Worlds,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (2004): 310–318Google Scholar; and Guitierrez, Cathy, “Sex in the City of God: Free Love and the American Millennium,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 15, no. 2 (2005): 187–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Nissenbaum, Stephen, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 158–173Google Scholar; and Spurlock, Free Love, 182–201. For two of the Nicholses’ major works on sex and marriage, see Nichols, Thomas Low, Esoteric Anthropology (New York: s.n., 1853)Google Scholar; and Nichols, Mary Gove and Nichols, Thomas Low, Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results; Its Sanctities, and Its Profanities; Its Science and Its Facts. Demonstrating Its Influence, as a Civilized Institution, on the Happiness of the Individual and the Progress of the Race (New York: printed by author, 1854)Google Scholar.

42 Nichols, Thomas Low, Free Love, A Doctrine of Spiritualism: A Discourse Delivered in Foster Hall, Cincinnati, December 22, 1855 (Cincinnati: F. Bly, 1856), 3Google Scholar, quoted in Noever, “Passionate Rebel,” 237. See also Mary Gove Nichols and Thomas Low Nichols, “The Free Love Controversy,” Nichols’ Monthly (November 1855): 309–311.

43 Braude, Radical Spirits, 82–202. On Spiritualism and women's agency in Britain, see Owen, The Darkened Room.

44 J. B. Conklin, “The Life of a Medium,” ed. Mary Gove Nichols, Nichols’ Monthly (August 1856): 115–116. See also [Mary Gove Nichols], “Psychological Experiences,” The Spiritual Magazine 4, no. 9 (1863): 407–410.

45 Nichols, Religions of the World, 112.

46 Nichols, “Editorial Miscellany,” 66.

47 Nichols, Religions of the World, 113.

48 In 1855, the Nicholses declared, “We claim the right to change opinions and actions, whenever we are satisfied that such a change is right.” Thomas Low Nichols and Mary Gove Nichols, Nichols’ Monthly (June 1855): 1.

49 Fanning, William, “Plenary Councils of Baltimore,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton, 1907)Google Scholar, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02235a.htm.

50 Pace, Edward A., “Spiritism,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton, 1912)Google Scholar; Warne, John, Monroe, , Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 140–149Google Scholar; Biondi, Massimo, “Spiritualism in Italy: The Opposition of the Catholic Church,” in The Spiritualist Movement: Speaking with the Dead in America and around the World, vol. 1, ed. Moreman, Christopher M., American Origins and Global Proliferation (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2013), 37–53Google Scholar; and Lynch, Andrew P., “The Spiritual Other: Catholicism's Response to Spiritualism,” in The Spiritualist Movement: Speaking with the Dead in America and around the World, vol. 3, ed. Moreman, Christopher M., Social and Cultural Responses (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2013), 3–18Google Scholar.

51 Daniels, J. W., Spiritualism Versus Christianity; Or, Spiritualism Thoroughly Exposed (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1856), 253–264Google Scholar.

52 Brownson, Orestes A., “Spiritism and Spiritists,” The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, vol. 9, ed. Brownson, Henry F. (Detroit: Thorndike Nourse, 1884)Google Scholar, 345, 346. Today, scholars distinguish between “Spiritualism” in the United States and Britain and “Spiritism” in France. Brownson preferred “spiritism” for all Spiritualist phenomena, “as it avoids confounding the doctrine of spiritists with the philosophical doctrine which stands opposed to materialism.” Ibid., 332–333.

53 Moore, In Search of White Crows, 70–101; Lause, Free Spirits, 23–43, 89–144; and McGreevy, John T., Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 19–67Google Scholar.

54 Bell, Caryn Cossé, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 197–221Google Scholar; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 81–82; Clark, Emily Suzanne, A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 98–114; and Daggett, Melissa, Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The Life and Times of Henry Louis Rey (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017)Google Scholar, 31–32, 87–88.

55 Joseph Barthet to Patridge and Britten, March 8, 1855, quoted in Hardinge, Emma, Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years’ Record of the Communion Between Earth and the World of Spirits, 3rd ed. (New York: printed by author, 1870)Google Scholar, 420–421. On Barthet, see Daggett, Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans, 23–38.

56 Stephen D. Andrews, “Which Threatens to Tear Our Fabric Asunder: The Opposition to American Spiritualism, 1848–1860” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2005), 40–45; and Lamont, Peter, “Spiritualism and a Mid-Victorian Crisis of Evidence,” The Historical Journal 47, no. 4 (2004): 897–920CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Protestant opposition to Spiritualism, see Moore, In Search of White Crows, 40–69; Andrews, “Which Threatens to Tear Our Fabric Asunder,” 231–326; and Knowles, Roddy, “Combating Nefarious Necromancy: Christian Theological Critiques of Nineteenth-Century American Spiritualism,” in The Spiritualist Movement: Speaking with the Dead in America and around the World, vol. 3, ed. Moreman, Christopher M., Social and Cultural Responses, 3 vols. (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2013), 19–36Google Scholar.

57 Taves, Ann, The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 56–69Google Scholar; Mullin, Robert Bruce, Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 108–137Google Scholar; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 19–42; Schultz, Nancy Lusignan, Mrs. Mattingly's Miracle: The Prince, the Widow, and the Cure That Shocked Washington City (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Curran, Robert Emmett, Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1805–1915 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 69–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McGreevy, John T., American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 104–141CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For comparison to France, see Kselman, Thomas A., Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

58 Kugelmann, Robert, Psychology and Catholicism: Contested Boundaries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 145, 144–151. On the Marian apparition at Lourdes, see Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies. That Soubirous's visions drew on existing folk beliefs in communication with the dead also suggested the need for the church to do boundary work. See Kselman, Thomas A., Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 58–63Google Scholar.

59 Kugelmann, Psychology and Catholicism, 134–135, 127.

60 Haag, Anthony, “Syllabus,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton, 1912)Google Scholar, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14368b.htm; Canon III.4 of the decrees of the First Vatican Council. Section I of the Syllabus of Errors contains the condemnation of naturalism.

61 Kugelmann, Psychology and Catholicism, 127, 144–151. For Kugelmann's triangulation of Catholicism, materialism, and Spiritualism (along with hypnotism and the mind cure), see 126–156.

62 Ibid., 137–138. For examples, see Brownson, “Spiritism and Spiritists,” 342–344; and Joseph Sadoc Alemany, pastoral letter, San Francisco, March 7, 1857, BV800 A14 #14, Pre-Vatican II Pamphlets Collection, Catholic University of America, courtesy of Madeleine Klem. On the Catholic Church making the same argument against Spiritism in France, see Sharp, Lynn L., Secular Spirituality: Reincarnation and Spiritism in Nineteenth-Century France (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2006), 140–145Google Scholar.

63 Quoted in Thurston, The Church and Spiritualism, 51.

64 [Mary Gove Nichols], “Psychological Experiences,” The Spiritual Magazine 4, no. 5 (1863): 233.

65 Brownson, Orestes A., The Spirit-Rapper; An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1854), 387–388Google Scholar, 363.

66 Clarke, Richard F., “Preface,” in A Convert Through Spiritualism, by Whitehead, A. E. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894), 3Google Scholar.

67 John Purcell to Peter Lefevere, February 22, 1857, Archdiocese of Detroit Collection, University of Notre Dame Archives, Notre Dame, Ind.

68 John Purcell to Antoine Blanc, March 6, 1857, Archdiocese of New Orleans Collection, University of Notre Dame Archives, Notre Dame, Ind.

69 Gleason reports that neither Francis Kenrick, archbishop of Baltimore, nor his brother, Peter Kenrick, archbishop of Saint Louis, objected to the Nicholses’ baptism. Gleason, “From Free-Love to Catholicism,” 302.

70 John Purcell to Antoine Blanc, March 6, 1857. Francis Kenrick also insisted on a “written renunciation.” Quoted in Noever, “Passionate Rebel,” 250.

71 “Free Lovers Converted to Catholicism,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 7, 1857.

72 For examples, see “Free Love Conversion,” New York Evangelist, April 16, 1857; and “Free Lovers Converted to Catholicism,” Saturday Evening Post, April 18, 1857; “Conversions to Catholicism,” Spiritual Telegraph, April 18, 1857; and “Free Lovers Converted to Catholicism,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 30, 1857. In “Converts to Catholicism,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 2, 1857, the anti-Catholic newspaper called the affair “An Unmitigated Humbug!”

73 Brownson, Orestes A., “Literary Notices and Criticisms,” Brownson's Quarterly Review 3, no. 1 (1860): 401Google Scholar.

74 John Purcell to Peter Lefevere, February 22, 1857.

75 Nichols, Nichols’ Health Manual, 99.

76 Louis Rappe to Antoine Blanc, November 29, 1858, Archdiocese of New Orleans Collection, University of Notre Dame Archives, Notre Dame, Ind.

77 Nichols, Nichols’ Health Manual, 100–101.

78 Thomas Low Nichols to Antoine Blanc, June 3, 1859, Archdiocese of New Orleans Collection, University of Notre Dame Archives, Notre Dame, Ind. See also Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless, 224.

79 Quoted in Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless, 112–113.

80 Nichols, Thomas Low, Lectures on Catholicity and Protestantism (Boston: P. Donahoe, 1859), 66–67Google Scholar, 80–81, 127, quote from 69. See also Thomas's, apologetic novel, Father Larkin's Mission in Jonesville; A Tale of the Times (Baltimore: Kelly, Hedian, and Piet, 1860)Google Scholar.

81 Thomas Low Nichols to Antoine Blanc, April 1860, Archdiocese of New Orleans Collection, University of Notre Dame Archives, Notre Dame, Ind.

82 Nichols, Thomas Low, Forty Years of American Life, vol. 1 (London: John Maxwell, 1864), 1–12Google Scholar; and Nichols, Forty Years, 2:227–368, quotes from 318. Many American Catholics opposed abolition as a threat to the social order and saw in the Union cause the specter of liberal nationalism. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 43–90.

83 Aspinwall, “Social Catholicism and Health.” See also Noever, “Passionate Rebel,” 288–310; and Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless, 236–248.

84 They arrived in England with a letter of recommendation to Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman, who helped them get established as writers. Through Wiseman they met Cardinal Henry Manning. While lecturing in Ireland, Thomas met Paul Cardinal Cullen. Nichols, Nichols’ Health Manual, 103–104.

85 Nichols, Forty Years, 2:81–118.

86 See, for example, Thomas Low Nichols, “Roman Catholic Spiritualism—An ‘Expostulation,’” The Spiritual Magazine, 1875, 143–144.

87 Nichols, Nichols’ Health Manual, 98; Whitehead, A. E., A Convert Through Spiritualism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894), 21Google Scholar.

88 National Era, May 7, 1857.

89 Peter R. Kenrick to John Purcell, June 3, 1857, John B. Purcell Papers, University of Notre Dame Archives, Notre Dame, Ind.

90 “Free Lovers Converted to Catholicism,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 7, 1857.

91 Nichols, Nichols’ Health Manual, 97.

92 Whitehead, A Convert Through Spiritualism, 21.

93 Nichols, Forty Years, 2:48–67.

94 Nichols, Thomas Low, A Biography of the Brothers Davenport. With Some Account of the Physical and Psychical Phenomena Which Have Occurred in Their Presence, in America and Europe (London: Saunders and Otley, 1864)Google Scholar.

95 Nichols, Thomas Low, ed., Supramundane Facts in the Life of Rev. Jesse Babcock Ferguson, A. M., LL. D., Including Twenty Years’ Observation of Preternatural Phenomena (London: F. Pitman, 1865)Google Scholar.

96 Ibid., xiv.

97 Brownson, “Spiritism and Spiritists,” 349.

98 For examples, see Nichols, Thomas Low, “Direct Spirit Reading in the Light. ‘Farewell’ Seance with Mr. Eglinton,” Light 1, no. 6 (February 12, 1881): 45Google Scholar; Nichols, Thomas Low, “The Uses of Spiritualism,” Light 1, no. 26 (July 2, 1881): 202–203Google Scholar; Nichols, Thomas Low, “An Hour with Mr. Eglinton,” Light 1, no. 36 (September 10, 1881): 283Google Scholar; Nichols, Thomas Low, “Mr. O'Sullivan's Reports of Seances,” Light 1, no. 36 (September 10, 1881): 286Google Scholar; and Nichols, Thomas Low, “A Materialised Card, and a Spirit Post,” Light 1, no. 39 (October 1, 1881): 309Google Scholar. These examples are drawn from only one year, 1881, but there are similar examples in Light throughout the 1880s and 1890s. The best repository of Light is maintained by the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals at http://www.iapsop.com/archive/materials/light/.

99 Nichols, Thomas Low, “A Remarkable Séance,” Light 1, no. 3 (January 22, 1881): 21Google Scholar. On Eglinton's mediumship at the Nicholses’ home, see Farmer, John S., ’Twixt Two Worlds: A Narrative of the Life and Work of William Eglinton (London: Psychological Press, 1886), 21–29Google Scholar.

100 “Goswell Hall,” Light 1, no. 17 (April 30, 1881): 136Google Scholar; and “British National Association. Conversazione,” Light 1, no. 14 (April 9, 1881): 107Google Scholar.

101 Nichols, Thomas Low, A Memorial to the Home Secretary in Behalf of Mrs. Susan Willis Fletcher, a Spiritualist, Unjustly Condemned to Twelve Months’ Imprisonment with Hard Labour (London: printed by author, 1881), 10Google Scholar. For Fletcher's account, see Fletcher, Susan Willis, Twelve Months in an English Prison (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1884)Google Scholar.

102 Mary Gove Nichols to William Vernon Harcourt, June 13, 1881, quoted in Nichols, A Memorial to the Home Secretary, 43; and Nichols, Mary Gove, “My Acquaintance with Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher,” Light 1, no. 17 (April 30, 1881): 134Google Scholar. Fletcher and the Nicholses communicated with some of the same spirits. Fletcher, Twelve Months, 382.

103 Nichols, Thomas Low, “Spiritualists Before the Law,” Light 1, no. 9 (March 5, 1881): 70Google Scholar. See Thomas's letter to the editor of Banner of Light, reprinted in Fletcher, Twelve Months, 432–436.

104 Nichols, A Memorial to the Home Secretary, 43; and Fletcher, Twelve Months, 459. Neither Thomas's memorial nor any of the Nicolses’ articles in the Spiritualist periodical press appear in the bibliographies compiled by Noever and Silver-Isenstadt. Noever, “Passionate Rebel,” 311–316; and Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless, 299–308.

105 Nichols, A Memorial to the Home Secretary, 12–13; and Nichols, Thomas Low, “Mrs. Fletcher's Conviction,” Light 1, no. 16 (April 23, 1881): 126Google Scholar.

106 Nichols, “Mrs. Fletcher's Conviction.” Mary also compared Fletcher to a “Christian Martyr.” See Nichols, “My Acquaintance.”

107 Light 4, no. 179 (June 7, 1884): 234.

108 Clark, A Luminous Brotherhood, 84–98; and Daggett, Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans, 88–90, 103–104. Carroll also notes similarities between Spiritualism and Catholicism. He argues that Spiritualists’ well-ordered spiritual realm and structured religious practice constituted a reaction to individualist Protestantism akin to the Oxford Movement or the Catholic conversions of Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, 80. Similarly, reflecting on the thread of liberal Christianity that ran through Spiritualism, Albanese concludes that “the anti-Christian reputation of Spiritualism seems overblown. For all the hostility toward organized sects and churches, the spirit messages were ambiguous—and decidedly combinative.” Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 228–233.

109 Thomas wrote, “If two modes of religion differ, one must be better than the other. We need the best. If two sects teach opposite doctrines, both may be wrong, but one must be.” Nichols, Thomas Low, Behaviour: A Manual of Manners and Morals (London: Longmans, Green, 1874), 213Google Scholar.

110 Nichols, Nichols’ Health Manual, 98. On Thomas's Spiritualist beliefs as a matter of “fact,” see also Nichols, Forty Years, 2:48–67.

111 Nichols, Supramundane Facts, 22–24.

112 The closest Mary came to doing so was asserting that there were both good and bad spirits. [Mary Gove Nichols], “Psychological Experience II (A Word to Catholics and Protestants),” The Spiritual Magazine 4, no. 4 (1863): 164–165.

113 [Nichols], Nichols’ Health Manual, 104.

114 Johnson urges scholars to specify the register in which hybridity occurs, “whether it is primarily linguistic, cognitive, visual, or otherwise sensorial; whether located at the level of social networks, or political mobilization, or the ritual production of power.” Johnson, “Syncretism and Hybridization,” 767.

115 Nichols, Thomas Low, “Material Conditions of Spiritual Manifestations,” Light 1, no. 10 (March 12, 1881): 79Google Scholar.

116 Thomas Low Nichols and Mary Gove Nichols, Catholic Telegraph and Advocate, May 23, 1857, quoted in Noever, “Passionate Rebel,” 263n90. See also [Nichols], “Psychological Experience II,” 168–169. To be sure, an emotional consonance undergirded these rhetorical moves. Catholics derived comfort from their connection to Christians past and present, whether as a source of grace or as consolation in the face of loss. Taves, The Household of Faith, 47–56. Likewise, many people, including the Nicholses, turned to Spiritualism in bereavement. Nichols, Nichols’ Health Manual, 108. For one discussion among many of the connection between bereavement and Spiritualism, see Faust, Drew Gilpin, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage 2008), 171–210Google Scholar. Hecker explicitly compared the communion of the saints with Spiritualism. Franchot, Roads to Rome, 251.

117 Nichols, Supramundane Facts, 22–24. The Nicholses made this argument frequently. See also Nichols, Nichols’ Health Manual, 98, 207; and Nichols, Forty Years, 2:88.

118 Nichols, “Roman Catholic Spiritualism,” 144.

119 [Nichols], “Psychological Experience II,” 164.

120 Quoted in Braude, Radical Spirits, 29–30.

121 My impression is that, as a diffuse, democratic movement, Spiritualists did less border policing than the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, Thomas had to defend the compatibility of Catholicism and Spiritualism to at least some Spiritualists. See Nichols, “Roman Catholic Spiritualism.”

122 [Nichols], “Psychological Experience II,” 163.

123 Carter, Paul A., The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Meyer, D. H., “American Intellectuals and the Victorian Crisis of Faith,” in Victorian America, ed. Walker, Daniel Howe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 59–77Google Scholar; Kuklick, Bruce, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to Dewey (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Larsen, Timothy, Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2004), 41–130Google Scholar. On Christians’ responsibility for these developments, see Turner, James, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

124 Braude, Radical Spirits, 32–55; Fuller, Robert C., Spiritual, But Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 38–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Oppenheim, The Other World, 59–110; Thomas A. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 125–162; Sharp, Secular Spirituality; and John Warne Monroe, Laboratories of Faith.

125 Nichols, Supramundane Facts, 17.

126 [Nichols], “Psychological Experience II,” 163.

127 Nichols, Forty Years, 2:65. See also Nichols, Religions of the World, 109; and Nichols, Thomas Low, Human Physiology the Basis of Sanitary and Social Science (London: Trubner, 1872), 158Google Scholar.

128 Oppenheim, The Other World, 59–110.

129 Nichols, Forty Years, 2:88.

130 Nichols, Supramundane Facts, 23.

131 [Nichols], “Psychological Experiences,” no. 5, 233–234.

132 Quoted in Thurston, The Church and Spiritualism, 55–56.

133 In 1933, the Jesuit scholar Herbert Thurston echoed the Nicholses’ arguments, noting the similarities between Spiritualism and “such well-known Catholic tenets as the belief in miracles, in purgatory, and in the revelations made to holy people,” as well as Spiritualism's “value as a weapon against crude materialism.” Thurston identified “a distinct Romeward trend” among religiously-minded Spiritualists. Ibid., 46, 143, 46. By and large, scholars have not followed up on Thurston's suggestion. Spiritualism is not considered as an avenue to Catholicism in the recent issue of the U.S. Catholic Historian dedicated to Catholic conversions (volume 32, number 4) nor in Franchot's Roads to Rome or Allitt's Catholic Converts. Among historians who note something like a “Romeward trend,” Aspinwall lists a few Catholics who were sympathetic to Spiritualism, Carroll notes that John Shoebridge Williams was “impressed” by the spirit of his daughter to attend Catholic mass, and Alison Winter reports that, in Britain, “Lord Shrewsbury and Lord Stanhope, both Catholic sympathizers, collected stories of conversions to Catholicism involving what they saw as supernatural trance states.” Aspinwall, “Social Catholicism and Health,” 261–263; Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, 80; and Winter, Alison, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 267Google Scholar.

134 Gleason, “From Free-Love to Catholicism,” 300; Howitt, Mary, Mary Howitt: An Autobiography, ed. Howitt, Margaret (London: Isbister, 1889), 317–321Google Scholar; Oppenheim, The Other World, 36–38; and Nichols, Nichols’ Health Manual, 98. Hearsay evidence suggests that Wiseman was sympathetic to Spiritualism. See “Cardinal Wiseman,” The Spiritual Magazine 6, no. 3 (1865): 134.

135 Home, Daniel Dunglas, Incidents in My Life (New York: Carleton, 1863), 137–138Google Scholar; Thurston, The Church and Spiritualism, 61–82; and Oppenheim, The Other World, 10–16. When the Nicholses converted to Catholicism the year after Home's conversion, newspapers compared them to Home. See, for example, “Free Lovers Converted to Catholicism,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 7, 1857.

136 British Spiritualist, Theosophist, and social reformer Anna Kingsford may count as another. She converted to Catholicism in 1870 upon “her receipt of nocturnal visitations, three in number, from an apparition purporting to be that of St. Mary Magdalen.” She apparently maintained her Catholicism throughout her life, although she criticized the church for not endorsing the anti-vivisection movement and described her beliefs as “pantheist.” Maitland, Edward, Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary, and Work, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (London: George Redway, 1896), 15–16Google Scholar, 324–325, 27–28.

137 Whitehead, A Convert Through Spiritualism, 8–9, 17–21; and Thurston, The Church and Spiritualism, 368–384. Whitehead did not mention Mary by name, but her description of the Nicholses and their conversion match the story presented here. Thurston likewise identifies the “American lady” in Whitehead's account as Mary. Ibid., 384n3.

138 Whitehead knew the story of the Nicholses’ conversion and so may have been influenced by it.

139 Whitehead, A Convert Through Spiritualism, 25, 21.

140 Ibid., 7, 9, 26. Whitehead reported that her friend “Margaret eventually became a Catholic under the same influences which helped me to become one.” Ibid., 12.

141 Clarke, “Preface,” 3–6.

142 Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, 156.

143 R. Laurence Moore makes the same mistake. Moore, In Search of White Crows, 45.

144 Nichols, Forty Years, 2:66–67.

145 Mary Gove Nichols to Alonzo Lewis, April 2, 1857, quoted in Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless, 217.

146 Quoted in Thurston, The Church and Spiritualism, 53.

147 Purcell noted with concern Mary's belief that one of a woman's “sacred rights is that of choosing the father of her child”—an idea expressly promoted in Thomas's Esoteric Anthropology. John Purcell to Peter Lefevere, February 22, 1857.

148 Thomas also published new editions under the title The Mysteries of Man. Cohen, “The ‘Anti-Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols,” 18–19, 19n36.

149 Silver-Isenstadt, Jean L., “Passions and Perversions: The Radical Ambition of Dr. Thomas Low Nichols,” in Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene, ed. Rosenberg, Charles E. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 197–199Google Scholar.

150 Nichols, Behaviour, 148–160. On the latter point, see Nichols, Human Physiology, cited by Silver-Isenstadt, “Passions and Perversions,” 204n18.

151 Mary Gove Nichols to Paulina Wright Davis, June 29, 1875, and Mary Gove Nichols to Paulina Wright Davis, July 28, 1875, Folder 1.6, Paulina Wright Davis Papers, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Note, however, that other women's rights activists had earlier distanced themselves from the Nicholses. Cohen, “The ‘Anti-Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols,” 2, 16–17.

152 Davis, Paulina Wright, A History of the National Women's Rights Movement (New York: Journeymen Printers’ Co-Operative Association, 1871), 11Google Scholar.

153 Mary Gove Nichols to Paulina Wright Davis, 1870, Folder 1.6, Paulina Wright Davis Papers, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. This letter is also quoted in Spurlock, Free Love, 200; and Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless, 246–247. On the Nicholses’ advocacy for women's rights in Britain, see Aspinwall, “Social Catholicism and Health,” 259–261.

154 Spurlock, Free Love, 127–131.

155 Stearns, Bertha-Monica, “Memnonia: The Launching of a Utopia,” The New England Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1942): 288–295CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gleason, “From Free-Love to Catholicism,” 283–298; and Blake, “Prophetess of Health,” 232. For an articulation of the Nicholses’ utopian vision, see Nichols, Thomas Low, Esperanza; My Journey Thither (Cincinnati: Valentine Nicholson, 1860)Google Scholar. Thomas first published this book serially during the Memnonia experiment.

156 Nichols, Lectures, 73–140. See also Nichols, Behaviour, 214–215.

157 Quoted in “Spiritualism and Romanism,” New-England Spiritualist, April 25, 1857.

158 Mary Gove Nichols to Alonzo Lewis, September 5, 1859, quoted in Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless, 225.

159 Quoted in “Spiritualism and Romanism,” New-England Spiritualist, April 25, 1857.

160 Nichols, Nichols’ Health Manual, 446; and Noever, “Passionate Rebel,” 304, 310n99.

161 “Transition of Mrs. Nichols,” Light 4, no. 179 (June 7, 1884): 229.