On the Trail of the Universal Brotherhood

Spiritualists, Abolitionists and Doomed Communal Experiments in the State of Ohio

This post is something of a much belated follow-up or lengthy addendum to my ancient essay The Invisible Landscape: Tracing the Spiritualist Utopianism of Nineteenth Century America, which I reposted on this substack last month (one month to the day, actually!). Ever since writing that piece back in 2020, there are two Ohio-based threads that stuck in my mind. The first was the story of an Ohio-based spiritualist commune that gobbled up the property of an earlier communalist experiment, one that was indirectly descended from New Harmony in Indiana, and which met a tragic end when, compelled by supposed spiritual forces, they relocated a local mansion house to the banks of the Ohio River, which swallowed it up and many of the sect’s members during a ferocious winter storm and flood in December of 1847.

The other thread concerned the Spiritual Brotherhood, a group of abolitionists, political reformers and socialists in the city of Cincinnati who claimed to have at their disposal the ability to communicate with the spiritual realm and the souls of the deceased. This has always deeply fascinated me: the Spiritual Brotherhood constituted a now fairly-unknown, but vitally important node in the constellation of radical forces that came together on the eve of the Civil War and promoted—among many things—free soil, the right of labor to its production, and the abolishment of the institution of slavery. Far from their religious and mystical ideas being aberrant, this convergence of revolutionary politics and the arcane and uncanny in this time seems to have been something of a relative norm.

Nonetheless, getting a handle of who the Spiritual Brotherhood actually was has been slippery and difficult; insofar as they appeared in the popular press of their time and place, it was mainly done in fragment and rumor. It turns out this is because the group, despite being fairly formal and influential, never had a fixed name. Depending on which publication is addressing them (or through which they addressed themselves), they were called the Spiritual Brotherhood, the Cincinnati Brotherhood, the True Brotherhood, or the Universal Brotherhood (which is the name I’m opting for in the remainder of this post). By figuring out this spectrum of names, I’ve been able to piece more of their history together by referring back to strange journals like The Univercœlum and Spiritual Philosopher, which was published by a group in New York City described only as “an association”.

I also knew that there was some relationship between the Universal Brotherhood and the doomed spiritualist commune, but the relationship between the two is much clearer now (the commune also now has a name: Excelsior). It was the Universal Brotherhood itself that formed the commune, and they did so on the advice of the man who stood at the center of the group: James F. Mahan (also named J.F. Mahan, James T. Mahan, and J.T. Mahan in various publications), a prophet, psychic medium and socialist—and, by many accounts, a sophisticated conman who drove at least one of his followers to insanity with his cosmic rumination and commandments.

However we interpret the character of James Mahan, what becomes abundantly clear is that he was plugged into a number of intellectual and political currents that had converged in Cincinnati: not only radical politics and spiritualist philosophy, but the idiosyncratic approaches to medicine that were flourishing in this time, literature and its promotion, and various religious movements (and their discontents).

Anyways, here’s a convoluted recounting of some aspects of the Universal Brotherhood’s story, which I think gives good insight into the sort of atmosphere that was permeating Cincinnati and the wider Ohio River Valley in the decade of the 1840s and beyond.

Prophets, Healers and Doctors

The documentary trail on James Mahan and his life is thin, vague and fragmented. What we can recover describes him as a “magnetic clairvoyant”, a “seer” skilled in the art of ‘animal magnetism’—or as it is now more commonly known, mesmerism. Readers of my ‘Invisible Landscape’ essay will recall that Mesmerism, named for Anton Mesmer, had been incubated in salons and parlors of Paris before leaping across the Atlantic to America, where it found an audience in, oddly enough, abolitionist circles while also laying the foundational groundwork for the subsequent explosion of spiritualism in New England.

Mesmerism entailed the manipulation of a “superfine”, vital fluid that was believed to course through the human body. Wielding a wand made from magnets, the mesmerist would steer and redirect this fluid substance, aiming to heal individual of whatever ailment—physiological or psychological—troubled them. Because individuals under the sway of the ‘mesmeric trance’ would fall into fits, convulsions, babbling outbursts of glossolalia, many of mesmerism’s most stalwart proponents took the fluidic modulations as tearing thin the boundaries between worlds: the “stammering of language” as communication with the spiritual world and a communion with souls who had passed from the mortal plan.

Accounts of Mahan, and his abilities as a clairvoyant and a mesmerist, vary from person to person, text to text. Conflicting statements stymie attempts to gain clarity about his path through life. One source describes him as somebody who worked on the steamboats that slowly navigated the muddy waters of the Ohio River—something like an itinerant wandering man who haunted the docks and taverns of various port cities looking for a stream of odd jobs that would take him from place to place.

Other sources identify Mahan as having some affiliation with the Mormons. This comes through most clearly in a bitter legal dispute in which the seer found himself embroiled (more on this legal dispute soon enough). In the middle of 1848, as revolutions tore across Europe and the blurring of abolitionism and spiritualism was reaching its fever pitch in America, a pamphlet about Mahan began circling through the corridors of both the radical underbelly and high society alike of Cincinnati. Motivated by this legal fight, it was stamped with the unwieldy title: Law Case of Pascal B. Smith, Exhibiting the Most Extraordinary Developments Arising from Mesmeric Clairvoyance, as Related by a Mormon Prophet. The ‘Mormon prophet’ in question was Mahan.

Whether or not Mahan was actually a member of one of the many Mormon groups operating in the Ohio River Valley at the time is an open question, but the period was marked by the widespread public perception that the religion was fundamentally bound to mesmerism. The 1856 book Female Life Among the Mormons, penned by Maria Ward, states that “Joseph Smith was one of the earliest practitioners of Animal Magnetism, and it was the use of this power at that time that convinced his disciples of his supposed gifts”. Ward charged that Smith had learned the “strokes… passes and manipulations” from a “German peddler”, and that she herself had been subjected to the mesmeric sciences, inducing her by “fascination” to wed a Mormon elder. “I was like a fluttering bird”, she wrote, “before the gaze of a snake charmer”.

What we can discern is that Mahan’s purported clairvoyant capabilities were initially unformed, rudimentary, although still considered remarkable—until he fell into contact with Cincinnati’s nascent medical establishment. His first mentor, who helped him bring “forth a system of physical and intellectual science”, is named as J.P. Cornell, who appears to have been—oddly enough—one of the founders of the Ohio College of Dentistry, chartered in Cincinnati in 1845. Mahan’s tutelage soon passed from Cornell to a man named only as “Dr. Curtis”; this was almost certainly Dr. Alva Curtis, a prominent figure in Cincinnati who held one foot in the most modern medical techniques and innovations of his day and the other in teachings and practices of the herbalist Samuel Thomson.

Thomson, raised in a New Hampshire family of Unitarians, had embraced herbalism after his wife had become ill following the birth of their first child; it was through consultations and multiple healing sessions with local “root doctors” that cured her. Thomson threw himself into the study of herbs and their effects on the human body, what mixture of natural substances triggered which physiological responses, culminating, finally, in the development of a “Thomsonian system” that utilized the esoteric blending of certain compounds and herbs to open “paths of elimination” to purge the body of the things that triggered sickness.

Soon this system began to radiate outwards from Thomson’s home in the small town of Surrey, New Hampshire, passing from village to village by word of mouth, and taking on with it a distinctive popular character: it was seen as a working class alternative to the modern medicine that was being drawn up in the high universities and urban zones, financed by the ‘benevolent’, philanthropic outposts of the robber barons and administered under the gaze of a rapidly consolidating class of technocrats and managers.

Alva Curtis stood perhaps at the exact halfway point of these two worlds, though today he is regarded as the leader of a ‘medical cult’ (these are the words of a retrospective on the proliferation of arcane approaches to the medical arts that flourished in Cincinnati in the 1800s, attributed to the so-called retrograde character of proper, modern medicine in the Ohio River Valley at the time). Thomson’s herbal studies led him to develop a theory of bodily energetics. Sickness arose from deviations from the human’s “natural heat”, either becoming too hot or too cold. The proper application of herbal remedies would restore the body to a state of homeostatic energy. Curtis’ twist was to couple this energetic approach to emergent understanding of the circulatory system and the central nervous system.

Was Curtis drawn to mesmerism, and did he use his update of Thomson’s approach to help Mahan cultivate his “system of physical and intellectual sciences”? I’ve found zero records linking Curtis to animal magnetism, though given the atmosphere in Cincinnati at the time it is certainly possible. There is faint whiff of similarities between the mesmerist emphasis on vital fluid flows with the body and the Thomsonian system of energetics; one can even eek out, maybe, the sort of passage that Philip Mirowski found in the history in economics, where early economic analyses were grounded in a physicalist worldview built atop the revolutions put in motion by Isaac Newton, and subsequent approaches to political economy were redrafted under the rubric of thermodynamics and heat transfer. When Anton Mesmer began to construct his dynamic science of animal magnetism, he claimed to have been following in the footsteps of Newton and his mechanics. Thomson and Curtis, meanwhile, fully inhabited the world that came into being in the way of the discovery of the dissipation of energy, entropy’s great humiliation, and the necessity of homeostasis for stability and the flourishing of life.

Digression

Frederick C. Waite writes that Ohio “has long been a battleground”, due to the intermixing of three distinct groups of settlers hailing from different regions of the United States. These settlers rolled in from Virginia, from Pennsylvania, and from New England, each bringing with them differing belief systems, cultural attitudes, political orientations incubated in fertile local soils and contexts, and folk-religious traditions. For Waite, this collision resonated within the proliferating “medical cults” that swept through Ohio and Cincinnati in particular. He distills them into three main groupings: homeopathy, eclecticism, and physiomedicalism, the latter being the term given to Dr. Alva Curtis’ updating of the Thomsonian system.

The school of ‘eclectic medicine’, one of the other major points of this Ohio medical triad, was itself closely related to Thomson’s botanical approach: it too relied on medical plants, taking strong cues from indigenous approaches to cure illness and disease.

It’s unsurprising that eclectic medicine found itself targeted by the managerial forces of the high progressive era. It was condemned, along with homeopathy and physiomedicalism, in the pages of the Flexner Report, drafted by Abraham Flexner (an American educational theorist and medical reformer who was born, incidentally, just down the Ohio River from Cincinnati, in Louisville, Kentucky) and published through the Carnegie Foundation. These types of schools, which had formed into a sprawling network of colleges—Cincinnati alone boasted a college of botanical medicine, formed by Curtis, and a college of eclectic medicine, among others—were dismissed by Flexner as the works of charlatans, cranks and snake-oil salesmen. There were other motivations in play as well: these colleges posed significant competition to the consolidation of the medical arts within the elite university system.

E. Richard Brown, in his great book Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in Capitalism in America, writes about some of the effects of the Flexner Report on different social groups:

Flexner's report… aided a process already underway. The rate of consolidation and elimination of medical schools was as rapid before the report as after. Between 1904 and 1915 some ninety-two schools closed their doors or merged, forty-four of them in the first six years to 1909 and forty-eight in the second six years to 1915.

Cut off from sources of funding, in part by Flexner's recommendation, the five disapproved medical schools for blacks soon closed. With racism as rampant in white medical schools and medical societies as throughout the rest of the society, medical care for blacks declined even further. In 1910 there was one black doctor for every 2,883 black people in the United States (compared with one physician to every 684 people for the nation as a whole), but by 1942 the ratio had grown further to one black physician for every 3,377 black people. Flexner's attitude toward women in medicine, more extreme than the views of many of his contemporaries, certainly contributed to keeping women at an average of less than 5 percent of all medical graduates from 1900 until World War II…

The report's direct impact on the profession was moderate, but its consequences were indirectly monumental. As Flexner himself pointed out, the report spoke to the public on behalf of the medical reform movement. It helped "educate" the public to accept scientific medicine, and, most important, it "educated" wealthy men and women to channel their philanthropy to support research-oriented scientific medical education. The Flexner report and the Carnegie Foundation's support brought economic and political power into the war as partisans of the "regular" doctors cum-scientific medical men.

Cast of Characters

Once James Mahan had developed his system—the exact particulars of which we sadly do not have any record, at least as far I’m hunted for them—he began to draw a circle of acolytes around him, and it was this group, finally, that formalized themselves as the Spiritual Brotherhood. A handful of those I’ve been able to identify are: John O. Wattles, a follower of the socialist teachings of Charles Fourier who had a long history of establishing short-lived communal experiments across the American midwest; Lucius A. Hine, a writer and head of various literary journals; Hiram S. Gilmore, a Unitarian preacher and abolitionist who formed a college for African Americans in Cincinnati; and Pascal B. Smith, a local, well-to-do merchant and businessman.

John O. Wattles

I touched quite a bit on Wattles in the original ‘Invisible Landscape’ post, so I don’t feel too compelled to go greatly in-depth on him here. Born in July of 1809 in Connecticut, Wattles first exposure to political radicalism came when he arrived at the Oneida Institute in New York for study. Formed initially as a “manual labor college”—a school that, in addition to traditional academic curriculum, incorporated agricultural and “mechanical” work as part of the student’s education—was an early hotbed of abolitionism. Much of this was motivated by the religious orientation of the school’s first president, George Washington Gale. A Presbyterian minister who had studied at the Princeton Theological Seminary, Gale had touched down as a preacher in the Burned-Over District of western and central New York. This was ground zero for the Second Great Awakening and a number of the religious groups and communal experiments that began to crawl from the east towards the western frontiers during the mid-1800s founded their genesis-point here (the region was described as being ‘burned over’ due to the “wild excitement” of religious revival that spread like wildfire through the local population).

Under Gale’s leadership, writes Elmo Calkins in his 1937 book They Broke the Prairie, a remarkable atmosphere was cultivated at the Oneida Institute:

Religious fervor was kept at a white heat. Studies were interrupted to hold protracted revival meetings, that there might be no backsliders. The result was a large crop of crusaders and reformers, who were later turned loose to fulminate against drink, slavery, Sabbath breaking, irreligion, some of whom became famous in their proselyting fields.

After having received his education in this heady atmosphere, Wattles set out and landed in Cincinnati in 1833, where he found a new mentor: Reverend Lyman Beecher, the head of city’s Lane Seminary (itself another manual labor college, taking cues from Oneida). He also became the “tutor of the family of James C. Ludlow, the past president of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society and financial backer of the Philanthropist, a prominent abolitionist journal”. Along the way Wattles met and married Esther Winery, a radical Quaker; the pair ventured out from Cincinnati to form several communes organized as Fouriest association. The most well-known of these was the Prairie Home Community in Logan County, Ohio (which was discussed in my previous post).

Following the failure of Prairie Home—it lasted scarcely a year before it collapsed into bitter infighting and feud—Wattles and his wife returned to Cincinnati, and began attending a series of religious-political meetings at the Kemble Street Chapel. It was on Kemble Street where Wattles and other reform-minded figures encountered James Mahan, who was by this point preaching a version of social reform that was drawn according to the instructions reached via his mediumship.

A brief summary of the happenings taking place at the Kemble Street Chapel can be found in a January, 1847 edition of The Harbinger—a leading Fouriest journal published by the Brook Farm Phalanx near Boston, Massachusetts:

In August last, I gave you some account of a small band of Social Reformers in this city [Cincinnati], holding weekly meetings for discussion in the Kemble Street Chapel… I then stated that as a distinctive characteristic from other reformers, they professed to receive their instructions directly from the spiritual world, by means of clairvoyants; and that they publicly taught that all persons may come into a state of spiritual communion by observing and obeying certain mental and physiological laws. I have now to add, in relation to this movement, that their numbers are steadily increasing, and that they have received into their communion additional talent and wealth, already having at command hundreds of thousands of dollars….

The end and aim of this movement is a thorough re-organization of society; but as to the specific plan of operations in effecting this object, I cannot speak definitely; I understand them to state that they attempt nothing but as they are instructed from the world of Light.

Lucius A. Hine

Lucius “L.A.” Hine was another figure who arrived on the Kemble Street Chapel’s steps and found himself swept into the transfiguring state of communion that was taking place within its walls. His background was somewhat different from that of Wattles: he was born in the small town of Berlin, Ohio in 1819 to a conservative—and prosperous—family of farmers, who tried to impress upon him a rather traditional education in theology and economics. Despite his family’s best efforts, Hine instead became attracted to the radical teachings of socialist reformers like Robert Owen and Horace Greeley (the former the leader of various communal experiments and reform movements in the UK and US; the latter the abolitionist, Fourierist, and founder and editor of the New York Tribune).

The pivotal encounter with these undercurrents propelled Hine into the worlds of abolitionism and unionism. Perhaps thanks to his early engagement with economics, he penned lengthy tracts (bearing names like Hine’s Political and Social Economy, Earth and Man, Being a Vindication the Relations of Man to the Soil) that refocused the problems of political economy in the question of the worker, industrial and agricultural alike.

But what Hine is best known for is his work as a promoter of regional and national literature. In November 1844, he debuted the Western Literary Journal and Monthly Magazine, which featured short stories and poems drawn from writers and poets working in relative obscurity across the midwest. The individuals that Hine partnered with in this venture are fairly intriguing: the editor was a young man named Hudson Kidd, who had previously been the editor for Own, another literary journal launched by the infamous purveyor of adventure stories and general weirdo Ned Buntline (real name: Edward Zane Carroll Judson). Buntline himself was drawn into Hine’s Western Literary Journal, and as he raced up and down the Mississippi and its tributaries by steamboat he would fire off short stories for the journal, or source materials from the various writers he met along the way.

(There actually seems to be some confusion on the exact order of events here. Some accounts state that it was through Hudson Kidd that Hine became associated with Buntline, but others state that Buntline made the introduction to Kidd).

The Western Literary Journal provided to be short-lived, and at least one author attributes its failure to Buntline’s tragic misadventures in Tennessee. After a period of wandering the snaking path of the numerous rivers and embarking on all manner of strange voyages—which allegedly included the capture of the perpetrators of a gruesome double murder and the undercover infiltration of a ring of conmen—he wound up in Nashville, where he ingratiated himself with the city’s southern elite by dressing like a fortune teller, writing poems and dispensing them freely at parties, and speaking in fluent Spanish. The life of parties didn’t last long, culminating in accusations of affairs, shoot-outs that left a man dead, and not one but two lynch mobs pursuing Buntline, who then had to go on the run to Pennsylvania.

Back in Cincinnati, Hine dusted himself off from the collapse of the Western Literary Journal by forming a second publication, The Quarterly Journal and Review. The tone of this journal reflected Hine’s shifting preoccupations: though it still showcased the work of regional and national writers and poets, it was more overtly political—and radical—than its predecessor. It was also marked by the growing spiritualist influence that mixed freely with these politics. One 1846 issue of the Quarterly contains the following statement from Hine on its cover:

Philosophers have demonstrated infinite Wisdom and boundless Benevolence of God in contemplating his Physical Universe, and it is time the same demonstration were made in relation to the Mental World. In the former, the sublimest order is manifest, while in the latter, the debasement and miseries that afflict mankind, indicate the deepest confusion and disorder. He is not responsible for the evils of the Mental Universe, for man originated them, and by man they can and will be removed.

Soon enough the Quarterly effectively dispensed itself of its literary aspects and merged with another local Cincinnati paper—The Herald of Truth, the official organ of the Universal Brotherhood.

Hiram S. Gilmore

For somebody as important as Hiram Gilmore was, we’re once again confronted with a rather fragmentary record of his life, achievements, and social and political ties. Here’s what we do know: like Lucius Hine, Gilmore came from a fairly prominent family with branches in Pennsylvania and Ohio. His father, Gurdon Gilmore, was the president of the Bank of Cincinnati, which, according to the Gilmore Genealogical Newsletter, was eventually merged into two other local banks, the National Bank of Commerce and the National Lafayette Bank. What then became of these banks? Who knows! They’ve probably been swallowed up and now persist, in some transmuted form, as another appendage in the Big Four hyperbank structure.

Not content to follow in his father’s footsteps into the banking world, Hiram instead opted for a life of religious study and preaching. He was trained in theology at Yale and Wesleyan, before returning to Cincinnati to study at Lane Seminary (mentioned before as the manual labor college under the leadership of John Wattles’ mentor Lyman Beecher). He was listed first as a Methodist, but, as many reform-minded individuals in this era were oft to do, he switched gears and became a Unitarian.

One source describes Gilmore as a “philanthropist”, another as a “warm-hearted abolitionist”. Indeed—his name came be found in the 1843 membership roster of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. This long-running organization dated back to 1775, when it was founded in Philadelphia (most of the early members of the Society were Quakers; the first president was Benjamin Franklin). Over time, the organization grew, with chapters sprouting up in surrounding states and attracting countless abolitionists and social reformers to its ranks. It became sort of the de facto organizational model for anti-slavery movements in both the north and south in the years leading up to the Civil War.

In 1844, Gilmore drew upon his wealth and familial heritage to finance the creation of the Gilmore School, a secondary education institution for African Americans—particularly freed slaves. According to Ohio historian Robert Cayton, the Gilmore School “employed five teachers to teach three hundred black students Latin, Greek, art, and music, among other subjects”.

An interesting item of note: in May, 1847, Gilmore was listed, along with one Robert Porter (another Universal Brotherhood member that I’ve not been able to dredge up any information on) and Cincinnati artist Augustus O. Moore as the principles in Gilmore, Porter & Moore, a “wholesale grocery commission and forwarding business” This is speculative, but I’ve wondered if the ‘grocery commission’ was akin to the Cincinnati Time Store set up by Josiah Warren, which attempted to price commodities in accordance with the labor time expanded in their production.

There’s three reasons I wonder this. First, there are various, undetailed accounts of similar experiments taking place in Cincinnati following Warren’s modest success. Second, Warren himself was close to—but not a member of—the Universal Brotherhood, seemingly commitment to a more grounded version of socialist organizing. Finally, there’s the fact that Gilmore, Porter & Moore seemed to be exclusively advertised in radical papers. Most of the references to the company that I’ve found come from the Anti-Slavery Bugle, an abolitionist paper that was launched in New Lisbon, Ohio with financial support from the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society. This brings us full circle: it was James Ludlow, the former president of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, who employed John Wattles as tutor for his family.

Pascal B. Smith (or, The End of the Universal Brotherhood)

Of all the core members of the Universal Brotherhood, Pascal Smith is the one of which I can find the least about. What is certain is that he was a well-to do merchant operating in Cincinnati, and he seems to have the source of the Universal Brotherhood’s “hundreds of thousands of dollars” referred to in Brook Farm’s The Harbinger. The evidence comes from a lawsuit launched by Harriet Smith, Pascal’s wife, who charged that her husband was a “person of insane mind” who “for a long time past has been laboring under religious delusion”.

The court application submitted by Harriet gives further details:

…he [Pascal Smith] is under the belief that one James F. Mahan is a medium of communication with supernatural that revelations pretended to be made by said Mahan are divine injunctions; that by means of the said pretended revelations the said Mahan and his confederates have already induced her said husband to lavish upon them a large part of his property, and this petitioner verily believes that under their influence, if not prevented by judicial interposition, her said husband and herself will be reduced to want. Your petitioner also represents that so affected is he by this insanity or delusion, that he has been making arrangements, within a day or two, to dispose of his dwelling house, of all that it contains, of his personal effects, with a view of leaving her alone and neglected, and has not told her of any intention of his to make any provision for her whatever.

The court application is reprinted in full in a July, 1848 issue of the American Journal of Insanity (which is still published today, albeit under the name of the American Journal of Psychiatry). In their introduction to the case, the Journal’s editors wryly opine that “a good Lunatic asylum is needed in Cincinnati”.

Smith wasn’t only dumping his own property into the hands of the Universal Brotherhood at the behest of Mahan: he was the one who provided the bankroll for the group to acquire a portion of former property of the Clermont Phalanx, the short-lived Fourierist commune nestled on the banks of the Ohio River near what is now the unincorporated community of Utopia. In an unsettling foreshadow of what was to come, one of the reasons that Clermont failed (besides the usual in-fighting and sectarianism that plagued practically every communal experiment in America) was that the river would periodically swell with great flood waters, spilling out into and ruining the agricultural fields that the communitarians had set aside to both feed themselves and provide revenue for their efforts.

The purchase of the former Clermont prophecy was a major turning point in the Universal Brotherhood’s trajectory. Up to this point it had avoided experimenting along ‘associationist’ lines; members were compelled instead to retaining their posts in usual society, be they bankers, printers, writers or businessmen, while effectively tithing some of their monthly to income to finance social reform efforts. But Mahan’s divinely-inspired dictates had shifted (perhaps he was taking a closer look at the Fourierists were doing, or perhaps John Wattles was an influence here): now was the time to put social re-organization into practice. The Universal Brotherhood was build atop the ruins of Clermont, organize a micro-society along spiritual lines, and act as a model for what could be repeated across the nation. With Pascal Smith’s money, this plan was put into action, and the experiment was given the name Excelsior.

This brings us to the events of December 1847. Mahan, in mesmeric trance, saw that the Brotherhood was meant to take the mansion house built by the Fouriests of Clermont, a massive thirty-room building, and relocate it brick by brick, plank by plank, to the edge of the Ohio. A winter storm bore down and river’s waters began to rise, but the great task of moving the building persisted, even as the floods drove them to carry the skeleton frame in pieces in boats. Finally, the task was completed, and as Excelsior’s members gathered within its halls and parlors to celebrate, the flood broke through, collapsing the building, crushing some of the commune’s members, others swept out into the river.

Each of our cast of characters was present for this, and each barely escaped with their lives. There isn’t much in the way of commentary by each survivor, but by every account this was the abrupt end of the Universal Brotherhood (and Mahan’s career as a clairvoyant seer). Hiram Gilmore was shattered by the events that tore apart their great experiment; he died two years later of tuberculosis, but some accounts state that he only perished due to the weakened state that he had been left in.

In 1851, Valentine Nicholson—a Quaker and veteran of the Prairie Home community that had been formed by John Wattles—led a group that sought to contact Gilmore’s spirit for advice. He reportedly gave them

an offer from the friends in the spiritual world to furnish us in this, with the necessary rules and regulations to enable us to form circles or societies which should be in harmony with each other and the members of which should be raised above conflict or strife and should all mutually labor to benefit and assist each other.