except that some accent marks had been left off. Curiously, three of those words were underlined but the fourth, dereglements, was not. Barthet also thought that the last word should have been placed in parentheses, as it was restating the two words just before it. He also noticed that the English word “lamentable” had been misspelled. Even with the errors and lack of specificity, Barthet found meaning in these few words from his native tongue. The message said: “Friends, disregard the malicious gossip of those who dispute statements, for their lack of experience leads them to lamentable states craziness.” He thought it referred to skeptical comments he had heard during his trip to Ohio. Beyond that, he was convinced that no one in the Koons household—or any of their visitors, save himself and his traveling companion—knew a word of French.
* * *
BARTHET had to cut short his stay at the Koonses’ because the food served there made both him and his companion sick, a complaint voiced more than once by city folks. But he would not be the first or last learned person to investigate the strange phenomena that had made Jonathan Koons a celebrity attraction in the spiritualist world. Upstanding citizens from all walks of life—“persons of undoubted respectability . . . whose testimony would not be refused in any court of justice in the world”—were flocking to an estimated 2,000 mediums throughout the United States. Among the converts were several writers of prominence and achievement, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Cullen Bryant, and James Fenimore Cooper. A few nationally known judges and politicians also espoused the new religion, including Judge John Worth Edmonds of New York and Nathaniel P. Tallmadge, formerly a US senator from New York and governor of the Wisconsin Territory. And just a decade later First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln would be hosting séances in the White House. But spiritualism was not a movement for the elite alone; thanks to its optimistic emphasis on human improvement and the equality of all souls, one to two million Americans in a national population of 23 million were said to have joined its ranks by 1850.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, spiritualism must have seemed to its devotees like a moral compass that could guide a rapidly changing society. Railroads and steamships had revolutionized transportation, and key inventions like the cotton gin and interchangeable parts had the United States careening from a nation of farmers to an industrial powerhouse with centers located mainly in the North. Along with German and Irish immigrants, millions of rural Americans moved to the cities to work in factories, creating the beginnings of the middle class—and liberating a pent-up desire for progress. Optimism was the order of the day; citizens in the East believed in a divinely sanctioned manifest destiny that entitled them to virtually all the land between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
But those years also had a dark side: overcrowding in the booming ports and cities resulted in poor living and working conditions and outbreaks of disease; infant mortality was high and industrial accidents horrific. The federal government had removed Native Americans from the South by treaty, or at the point of a bayonet, from their homelands east of the Mississippi, clearing millions of acres for slaveholding white settlers. Wars had been fought out West to gain more land, and with each new acquisition of western territory fresh controversies would erupt about whether that territory should enter the Union as a free or slave state. From the shining new cities of the North to the colonnaded verandas of the South, the threat of violence hissed and simmered.
Religion, too, was in ferment; in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a wave of religious fervor called the Second Great Awakening had swept across the United States and on to the frontier. Along with a renewed emphasis on a personal relationship with the Savior, some Christian believers looked forward to a new millennial age, all the while working to purify society so that Christ could return to Earth.
Nowhere was this revivalism more prevalent than in western New York, where spiritualism was born in 1848. This region eventually became known as the Burned-Over District because so many religious fires had swept the population that few people were left to convert. The Second Great Awakening not only fueled Protestant denominations such as the Methodists and Baptists but spurred the rise of churches that believed in direct communication with spirits. The Shaking Quakers, or Shakers, for one, had long been known for their ecstatic rites—whirling and stamping dances and speaking in tongues, as well as their propensity to fall under the influence of spirits as they worshipped. Mediums, also called instruments, heard from entities as diverse as Napoleon, Native Americans, and even neighbors who appeared at their own funerals to console the living. And in 1823 an angel had appeared to Joseph Smith, revealing to him the location of inscribed golden tablets buried near Palmyra, New York, and providing the foundational text for the Mormon religion. Other residents of the Burned-Over District had once discarded their worldly possessions, believing the preacher William Miller’s prediction that Jesus Christ would return to Earth no later than March 21, 1844.
The desire to cleanse a wicked world in advance of the Second Coming also spilled over into the social arena. Reformers in central and western New York, some inspired by their Christian faith, sought to improve society across a broad swath of issues affecting the here-and-now, not just the hereafter. The first women’s rights convention ever held in the United States took place in 1848 in Seneca Falls, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton shocked listeners with her demand for the vote. Intertwined with the women’s movement were campaigns for temperance, prison reform, and the abolition of slavery. Utopian societies also flourished there for a time, experimenting with new ways to live. When the sisters Kate and Maggie Fox introduced spiritualism into the cauldron, it must have seemed just as plausible as other “isms” that residents had entertained over the years.
Spiritualism began in a rented farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, where Kate, Maggie, and their parents heard mysterious noises in the night. Soon Kate, 11, and Maggie, 15, reported that they could communicate with the spirit of a murdered peddler through raps—two for yes and silence for no. Within weeks, hundreds of curiosity seekers had visited the farmhouse, upsetting the Foxes’ daily routines but ensuring notoriety for the two girls. Shepherded by their older sister, Leah, the pair first moved to Rochester and eventually wound up in New York City, where all three siblings became internationally famous mediums known as the Rochester Rappers.
Now, just a few years after the Fox sisters had made their debut, Jonathan Koons was attracting an ardent following. Most visitors, like a Cincinnati businessman delving into the séances, came away convinced that the ghostly hands and unearthly music were “the work of an invisible intelligent power.” “Hundreds, and I believe thousands, (judging from a register kept there) have been there from almost all parts of the United States,” the businessman wrote, “and I have yet to hear of the first one who has gone away skeptical as to the genuineness of the performance.”
Even so, the French mesmerist Barthet was left to wonder about what he had heard and seen. The velvety blackness of the séance room seemed to produce sheer magic, but returning to the light sent questions seesawing through his mind. Barthet tumbled the evidence over and over as he left Athens County, never to return. Was Jonathan Koons a martyr for the spiritualist cause, an unlikely scientist harnessing yet unknown powers of the universe, or—as his critics charged—merely a charlatan of the highest order? Answering these questions would not be easy. But from 1852 on, the spiritualist movement would claim Jonathan Koons as one of its most charismatic figures—a backwoods seer whose legacy would rival even that of the famous Fox sisters for a place in its history.
2
“The Place of My Nativity”
IN THE fall of 1833, 22-year-old Jonathan Koons set out to see a new world. He was bound for the Ohio Country, where the corn was said to grow 14 feet high in the river bottoms and the juice of wild strawberries could reach a horse’s knees. Venturing out from his home near Bedford, Pennsylvania, he traveled first to Pittsburgh and then to Mercer, Pennsylvania, on the Ohio border, where his two uncles lived. Over the next several months he would traipse through 14 Ohio counties, eventually finding the one in which he would cast his fortune as an
