Ashley Reed is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship. A scholar of nineteenth-century U.S. literature and American religions, she is the author of Heaven’s Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell UP, 2020). Her articles have appeared in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, Religion Compass, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. She has chapters published or forthcoming in American Literature in Transition, 1820-1860 and The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics.

The Spirit and the Settler: Religious, Racial, and Territorial Boundary-Crossing in the Mountain Cove Community and its Afterlives

The American Spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century is a story of boundary-crossing. In 1848, two young girls living in Hydesville, New York, claimed to receive messages from the dead, troubling the boundary between this world and the next. Female mediums used spirit communication as a warrant for progressive activism, defying gendered boundaries for women’s political participation. And as the movement spread, it transgressed the theological boundaries of white Protestant Christianity. These aspects of Spiritualism are well known; less discussed, however, are Spiritualism’s material and territorial ambitions—the way that its imaginative boundary-crossing facilitated the transgression of physical and cultural borders during the period of US westward expansion.

This paper explores one such instance of settler colonial Spiritualism, the Mountain Cove Community. Founded as the “Apostolic Circle” in Auburn, New York, in early 1850, the Mountain Cove Community relocated to the Kanawha River Valley in western Virginia to await the second coming of Christ. The community displaced the region’s native inhabitants, only to collapse quickly and spectacularly amid a series of sexual and financial scandals. The community’s fall was widely publicized in contemporary media, and ten years after its demise, Bayard Taylor published a parodic critique of the community, “Confessions of a Medium,” in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. In the story, the fictionalized community manifests the spirit of the Sauk Warrior Black Hawk in the body of the circle’s white female medium, condensing sexual, racial, and territorial boundary-crossing into a single spiritual/material form and revealing the Mountain Cove Community’s settler ambitions.

This paper considers the confluence of the spiritual and the territorial in the geographic interior of the North American continent and the psychic interior of the séance room. It argues that considering Spiritualism as a territorial phenomenon helps to reveal how detaching spiritual identities from both physical bodies and ancestral lands enabled white settler colonial projects and furthered what historian James Belich has called “the settler revolution.”