Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[A]chsa Sprague’s best years, ones that would bring her national renown, were still ahead, but of course she couldn’t know that. At this moment, all she wanted to do was die.
And who could blame her? She had been struck down by a mysterious ailment. What started as months of confinement at home, and for long periods in bed, had stretched into years. She poured out her misery in a poem, writing, “A young girl in a darkened room, Chained by disease, — a living tomb!”
“What hope is there for me but in death?” she asked her diary at another point. “If I could know for sure that death would bring the higher sphere I would long for it.”
The life of an invalid would try anyone’s soul, but Sprague was particularly ill suited to the task. She had shown signs of great intelligence since shortly after her birth in 1827 in Plymouth Notch.
Sprague excelled at school and from a young age helped other children with their schoolwork. By the age of 12, Sprague was teaching classes. The job gave her a degree of responsibility and freedom outside the home that was unknown to most young women during the early 1800s. It may have been the loss of that independence that plagued her most during her six years of confinement.
The first symptoms Sprague experienced were exhaustion and stiff, sore joints. At times, the ailment left her unable to walk. By the age of 20, she had to give up teaching. In better moments, even when she couldn’t walk, she managed to ride a horse. On one ride, she fell from the horse and lay in the grass, unable to remount it until a farmer noticed her predicament. She found humor in the incident, but feared that if her family learned of it, her riding days would be over.
Her symptoms worsened. A series of doctors proved unable to help her, despite their hefty bills. The common diagnosis was a “scrofulous disease of the joints,” but historians today think it was more likely rheumatoid arthritis. Some people murmured that the trouble was in her head, not her body. One woman in town said Sprague was merely “lovesick” and suggested a spanking would cure her.
Sprague was deeply frustrated by her lack of progress. “Once more I am unable to walk or do anything else … and see no prospect of being any better,” she wrote in her diary, “see nothing before me but a life of miserable helplessness.”
She prayed for a cure or death.
In early 1854, she believed her prayers were answered. On Feb. 9, she wrote in her diary that her health had suddenly begun to improve: “(A)ll this (misery) is now passing away. The chains of disease are falling off my limbs.”
She said that she had been visited by spirits, who had said to her, “Come forth from thy darkness, oh thou child of sorrow. Come forth even though thy eyes are dimmed with weeping, for thy grief shall be changed into gladness.”
Progress was slow but several months later, Sprague was able to leave her sickbed behind. Though she ascribed her recovery to the intervention of spirits, modern researchers note that rheumatoid arthritis often strikes sufferers and then abates for a number of years. Whatever the cause of her recovery, Sprague quickly found a new calling.
“I must be strangely ungrateful,” she wrote, “if I am not willing to do and bear much, yes very much, for those who have raised me from helplessness to comparative strength, from pain and suffering to happiness, from darkness again to the blessed sunlight of the outer world.”
Sprague would become a medium, using what she believed were her newfound powers to communicate with spirits. She was thrusting herself into the midst of the Spiritualist movement, a popular religious doctrine that believed that the dead could communicate with the living. She would become one of its most famous proponents.
Sprague would eventually become known as the “preaching woman,” but she took on the role tentatively. She said spirits coaxed her into public speaking, a role viewed by larger society as inappropriate for a woman. “What, still doubting?” the spirits told her. “There shall be snarls; there shall be foes. But when thou doubtest most, we shall be near.”
At first she spoke only near her hometown, but as word of her talks spread, invitations to speak began to pour in. At the height of her popularity, she received nearly 90 invitations a year. She rejected most in order to keep her regular Sunday speaking engagement in South Reading.
But she sometimes accepted requests to speak far from home, in Michigan, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Baltimore, Philadelphia and also Canada. The speaking engagements brought large audiences and brought her fame.
Sprague was something of a spectacle. She did things that other women of her era simply didn’t do. She traveled alone and at her performances would stand before a large crowd and hold forth. Often she spoke while in some sort of trance, speaking, she said, with the words of some departed soul. She was also said to be proficient at “automatic writing,” copying down the words of the deceased, and at painting while blindfolded.
Sprague’s talks allowed men to stare at her, something men in polite society couldn’t do to other women. As a result, many became infatuated with her. One admirer wrote her to say, “Often in the quiet hours of night … do you visit me in my imagination as you stood inspired before the audience in our little hall.”
A married spiritualist wrote: “I never felt so much like worshipping a mortal as I did you for the intelligence that spoke through you … although I might agree with a young man if he said you was a very comely and rather good looking young lady.”
Sprague received numerous marriage proposals, including at least five by mail. She rejected them all, perhaps not wishing to risk her hard-won independence.
To discourage one suitor, who had apparently only read accounts about her, Sprague wrote: “I have nothing to say about myself except that I am as ugly looking as nature could make me and as for my real self, the Internal, I shall let you draw your own conclusions from my style of writing, as I of course shall take the same liberty with regard to you.”
Women also felt drawn to Sprague, both for her spiritual message and for the example of independence she set. “Thankful and happy was I in making your acquaintance,” wrote one woman, “for I feel that another bright star has been added to the galaxy.”
Sprague also had critics who said she was interested only in money. The suggestion stung her. “If money was my object,” she wrote, “I might get four times what I do. … I cannot make Spiritualism a stepping-stone to wealth; it seems like debasing the most beautiful things.”
Her wide travel brought her in touch with some of the ugliest things in American life. She was shocked by the slum conditions she encountered in large cities and once questioned whether the money spent on the lavish oyster dinner accompanying one of her talks might be better spent elsewhere.
Sprague became an ardent opponent of slavery and a strong supporter of prison reform and temperance. She also believed that all women should have the opportunities she enjoyed, rejecting the narrow choices available to women in her era, that of being “either a slave or a butterfly.”
After seven years of preaching the cause of spiritualism, Sprague fell ill again. During her last six months, she wrote frenetically, perhaps realizing her time was short. At one point, she is said to have dashed off a poem of 4,600 lines in a scant 72 hours. She died on July 6, 1862, at the age of 34.
But to spiritualists, death wasn’t the end. According to other spiritualists who made pilgrimages to her grave in Plymouth Notch, Sprague continued to communicate with them. Once, she allegedly spoke to her friend and fellow spiritualist, Melvina Townsend. In her message, she even managed to speak in rhyming couplets. “Sister!,” she supposedly said, “One simple word/I love you still!/My strength shall be conferred/Your need to fill. I come to you at night./ In some still hour;/ And lend my spirit’s might/To give you power.”
Achsa Sprague wasn’t through. For nearly 20 years after her death, people published books that they said contained words dictated by Sprague’s spirit.