The Presence of the Dead among U.S. Protestants, 1800-1848

Historians have long known that antebellum American Protestants were fascinated by death, but they have overlooked Protestant relationships with the dead. Long before the advent of séance Spiritualism in 1848, many mourners began to believe - contrary to mainstream Protestant theology - that the souls of the dead turned into angels, that the dead could return to earth as guardian angels, and that in graveyards one could experience communion with the spirits of the departed. The version of Protestantism these mourners developed was therefore, to use Robert Orsi's term, a religion of presence, a religion in which suprahuman beings - in addition to God - played an important role. Based on diaries and popular sentimental literature written mostly by women, this article brings to light an unexplored facet of antebellum Protestant lived religion: that the dead were present with us tho' invisible, as one young woman wrote about her deceased sister.