Although the eminent nineteenth-century public figure John Edmonds began spiritual communication with his wife, he soon expanded spiritual communication beyond ordinary communication with family and friends. Edmonds studied spiritual communication with all the earnestness of a modern, professional scholar:

To that inquiry I have directed my earnest attention, devoting to the task for over two years all the leisure I could command, and increasing that leisure as far as I could by withdrawing myself from all my former recreations. I have gone from circle to circle, from medium to medium, seeking knowledge on the subject wherever I could attain it, either from books or from observation, and bringing to bear upon it whatever of intelligence I have been gifted with by nature, sharpened and improved by over thirty years’ practice at the bar, in the legislature, and on the bench.^

Professed doctrine on spiritual communion was to Edmonds conflicting and unsatisfying. He sought evidence from primary sources and carefully assembled documentation and references:

It was in January, 1851, that I first began my investigations, and it was not until April, 1853, that I became a firm and unquestioning believer in the reality of spiritual intercourse. During twenty-three months of those twenty-seven, I witnessed several hundred manifestations in various forms. I kept very minute and careful records of many of them. My practice was, whenever I attended a circle, to keep in pencil a memorandum of all that took place, so far as I could, and, as soon as I returned home, to write out a full account of what I had witnessed. I did all this with as much minuteness and particularity as I had ever kept any record of a trial before me in Court. In this way, during that period, I preserved the record of nearly two hundred interviews, running through some 1,600 pages of manuscript.^ (cf. ^)

With skepticism and concern for fraud, Edmonds carefully evaluated experience specifically organized to demonstrate spiritual communion. He began with the Rochester Knockings that the Fox sisters conducted.^ ^ Edmonds soon became engaged in communication with the dead spirits of prominent U.S. public figures: Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Benjamin Franklin, and John C. Calhoun. He also communicated extensively with Emanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth-century Swedish scientist, philosopher, and mystic. Underscoring his interest in empirical science, Edmonds engaged in spiritual communication with Francis Bacon, an early seventeenth-century philosopher who contributed greatly to the development of empirical science.

Late in 1853, Edmonds, along with his principal co-investigator, George T. Dexter, published Spiritualism. This 505-page book provided a verbatim text of what they claimed to be their communication with eminent public figures. Edmonds was the primary author of this book. The first eighty pages consist of Edmonds’ introduction and his appeal to the public (dated Sept. 1, 1853). Dexter provided a second, nineteen-page introduction. Edmonds edited and wrote out in full all the communications with spirits that made up the rest of the book. This book attracted widespread attention, sold briskly, and went through at least nine printings by 1854.

Although the eminent nineteenth-century public figure John Edmonds communicated extensively with family and friends, knowledge-seeking dominated his documented communication with the dead. John’s brother Francis died on February 7, 1863. John claimed to have first established communication with Francis’ spirit on April 1, 1863. The communications medium was Mrs. Hayden and raps on a table. John published a transcript of the communication because he thought it provided useful knowledge about life beyond the grave. John described the start of communication thus:

Very soon the raps came on the table, rapid, distinct, and cheerful.
Mrs. H. asked the spirit to give his name.
It was spelled out, “Francis Edmonds.”
I said there was a middle letter.
It rapped out “W.”

One might have expected from John exclamations of joy at the first indication of communication with his dead brother. But John spoke with lawyerly precision to confirm the identity of the witness. John continued in this manner:

I asked who was with him?
He rapped out, “Sarah” (my wife), “Samuel” (my father), “John” (my brother), “Lydia” (my mother).

John now understood himself to be communicating with five dead members of his immediate family. John’s next words were a question regarding the phenomenology of dying:

I asked him if, when dying, he was conscious he was going?

After a two more exchanges concerning the phenomenological details of dying, Francis, unprompted by a “how are you?,” declared that he was “much happier than I can express.” Francis then immediately apologized for opposing John’s evidence concerning spiritual communication:

As you are aware I was always opposing you in this theory {spiritualism}, and now in all due honor to you, I feel it no more than duty to return and tell you that I was terribly mistaken, brother, while you were and are correct; and I crave your forgiveness, if I might unwittingly or though ignorance have opposed you, so as to have made myself disagreeable to you or your, and which I sincerely acknowledge to be wilful stubbornness on my part, fighting against well-authenticated facts.^

This apology and request for forgiveness are neither common substance nor in typical style of ordinary communication with family members. That John would publish this text indicates his concern for knowledge.

Edmonds documented relatively little communication with dead friends and family. Edmonds’ first published communication with the dead appeared in early 1852 in the spiritualist journal The Shekinah. Edmonds stated in that publication that he communicated with several dead family members:

I recognized my father, my mother, my children, and my brother and sister, some of whom had been thirty years in the Spirit-World.^

Edmonds, however, sparsely documented his communication with family. He seemed reluctant to even print his wife’s name: he usually referred to her in his spiritual transcripts only as “S–”. In this same article, Edmonds more extensively documented his communication with authoritative figures: William Penn, Isaac Newton, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Benjamin Franklin. Edmonds’ weightiest publication, Spiritualism, included a record of Edmonds’ spiritual communication from April 3 to August 28, 1853. That book primarily documented communication with Swedenborg and Bacon. Edmonds noted that he omitted records of spiritual communication that were not “of general interest.”^ Edmonds seems to have considered ordinary communication with dead family and friends not to be of general interest. But that is the type of spiritual communication that historically has been the most popular.

Edmonds argued that spiritual communication served the public interest as a source of knowledge. He asserted that knowledge from such communication, to the extent it could be developed, promoted private and public goods:

Distorted sometimes by the imperfection of the mediums through which the intercourse comes, and sometimes perverted by the passions of those who receive it, yet, carefully considered and patiently studied until understood, I can safely assert, after nearly nine years’ earnest attention to the subject, that there is nothing in it that does not directly tend to the most exalted private worth and public virtue.

For those who did not see any such development, Edmonds counseled patience:

its progress is slow; not from want of power to communicate, but from want of capacity to comprehend.^

Edmonds was aware of hostility to spiritual communication, but he considered the knowledge that it provided to have “immense consequences”:

I am fully aware of the strong prejudice there is in the public mind against spiritualism in all its aspects. …

But having imbibed my belief, after a most careful and painstaking examination of the whole subject in all its bearings – having satisfied alike my conscience and my judgment that I had found in it a religion fraught with immense consequences to mankind, I felt that I ought not to, that I could not, withhold the expression of my views frankly and fearlessly.^

As interests in spiritualism rapidly grew, Edmonds recognized media frauds and abuses, but never doubted that spiritualism offers the world “glorious truth”:

oh! amid what discouragements! With the subject so dear to me, tainted with man’s folly and fraud; destined to see fools run mad with it, and rogues perverting it to nefarious purposes; meeting in its daily walks, (owing to the sad imperfection of the instrumentalities used) much that was calculated to discourage and dishearten; and beholding how the world for whom this glorious truth comes, turns from it and reviles it, I have never for one moment, faltered from that hour in my belief.^

Edmonds did not specify systematically spiritualism’s distinctive truths and consequences. What these were was a matter of intense but unstructured controversy. To demonstrate the value of spiritualism as a source of knowledge, Edmonds published new texts from dead authorities and made ad hoc claims to knowledge. What made Edmonds spiritualism extraordinary was these claims to such knowledge.

John Edmonds, who served as a judge on New York State’s highest court of law, considered punishment policy from a spiritualist perspective. In a public lecture given in 1860, Edmonds criticized a text from Washington Irving’s Sketchbook that examined grief by describing grave decorations.^ Edmonds considered this text to illustrate “popular theology.” Edmonds himself favored a more direct approach to examining the effects of a death sentence:

When himself administering the government, and before he had received the light of spiritualism, the plea of death as a punishment appeared to him absurd. How could we know that death would be the ultimate punishment? Since his reception of the light of spiritualism, he had received confirmation of his thoughts. He condemned nearly a score of persons to death in the course of his judicial career, and he had been visited by two who were executed in pursuance of that sentence. He had learned, to his satisfaction, at least what was the effect of the penalty of death.

Edmonds reported that one of the spirits of the executed had come to him “full of hatred and revenge.” Edmonds told the spirit, “You suffered in consequence of the crime that you had committed, but the spirit replied, “No matter. I was not prepared to leave life – I enjoyed it, and I hate you.” In contrast, the other spirit volunteered that he had in life acquired bad habits, fallen into temptation, and killed a man. That spirit thanked Edmonds:

You have carried me beyond the reach of temptation by the execution that you condemned me to. You improved my condition. I thank you for taking my life.^

Edmonds argued that “governments and priests” had fostered fear of death as “an instrument of power” and “an instrument of mental subjugation.” Edmonds favored humane, reformative imprisonment over the death penalty.^ Spiritual communication provided Edmonds with knowledge he considered useful for rational, consequential analysis of punishment practices.