WHO KNEW?:

Five years earlier, few (if any) who knew Sprague would have imagined her playing a lead role in something like this, or even standing in front of a thousand people. Back then, she struggled to walk across a room, due to debilitating chronic pain. She rarely left her family's house, except for frequent visits to doctors. But things had changed dramatically, and Sprague's gratitude toward the "spirit friends" who had taken away her pain would motivate much of the rest of her life, including her involvement in the Rutland Free Convention.

After the election of officers that morning in Rutland, the congregators took turns proposing resolutions for the convention to adopt. The second of the 11 resolutions stated, "that Slavery is a wrong which no power in the universe can make right." Taking a radical stance against slavery's institutional enablers, the resolution explained that any government or any religious body or figure that "by silence or otherwise, authorizes man to enslave man, merits the scorn and contempt of mankind."

To modern readers, Spiritualists may seem strange partners to abolitionists, women's rights advocates, and other 19th-century radicals, but Spiritualism was more than just floating tables. The movement sprang up in the United States in the 19th century and encompassed a wide range of beliefs. But unlike mainstream Christianity, it had no doctrine and no official leaders. The only thing all Spiritualists had in common was a belief that the dead could communicate with the living.

Angels and spirits were credited with acting through mediums who painted, sang, recited poetry, wrote, lectured and took daguerreotype photographs under their influence. Freedom and the shedding of chains were popular Spiritualist themes, particularly of Sprague's.

Sprague herself was a "trance medium." While standing in front of audiences of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people, she willed spirits to possess her -- and she spoke as they bid her to.

Not everyone at these events was a believer. Sprague was sometimes heckled. She was particularly vexed by a group of rowdy ladies in Middlebury, Vermont, who rapped and laughed during her lecture. But for those who listened carefully, her lectures delivered a surprisingly radical message.

By the time Sprague took the floor in Rutland, as the last speaker of the convention's first day, the sun had set. The New York Times reported that after standing with her eyes closed for five minutes, her face twitched, her legs were unsteady and her hands spasmed. Then, she spoke, addressing the crowd as if giving a sermon. Her words were later published in a book of the convention's proceedings:

"Shall any say, 'Let the captive go free, burst the gyves [shackles] from the slaves, take poverty away from the world, let every one be blest with enough and to spare, let ignorance be enlightened, in this world, before we raise the question of the immortality of the human soul?'

When man thinks God is a vengeful and wrathful deity, how can he help wishing to be revenged upon his enemies?"

Her delivery was captivating. Sprague "carried herself with entire ease and self-possession -- if that is the proper term to apply to one who is possessed by a spirit," reported The Burlington Free Press, describing another of Sprague's trance lectures. "At first, her eyes were closed, but after a while her eyes opened and her appearance was in no wise different from that of a good looking woman delivering with much action and some feeling, a lecture," the Free Press wrote. "Her discourse was remarkable for its steady flow of words, which rolled out without a moment's hesitation."

On that evening in Rutland, the words that flowed forth from Sprague advised that if men and women were confident of their immortality, they would be inspired to act selflessly. These spiritually free people would say, "I will do my duty nobly, because I see its truth and nobleness in my own spirit."

"The soul, set free from its bondage, hears the clanking of the chains of the prisoner and of the slave with harsher discord than ever before," Sprague said, implying that the most noble souls are prison reformers and abolitionists.

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