The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land

by John Benedict Buescher

John Murray Spear was one of nineteenth-century America's most interesting characters. A leading social agitator against slavery and capital punishment, Spear also became the nation's most flamboyant spiritualist, inventor of “spirit machines,” and advocate of free love. In his captivating biography, John Buescher brings to life Spear's superlatively odd story. While no photograph or engraving of Spear exists, and his letters and personal papers are scarce, Buescher recreates in this book a sympathetic, even heroic, figure who spent the most energetic decades of his career absent, in a sense, from his own life, displaced by other spirits. Born in 1804, John Murray Spear started his career as a Universalist minister. He later was a close colleague of William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Parker in the abolitionist movement, an operator on the underground railroad in Boston, an influential leader in the effort to end the death penalty and to reform prison conditions, and a public advocate of the causes of pacifism, women's rights, labor reform, and socialism. Buescher chronicles Spear's work as an activist among the New England reformers and Transcendentalists such as Bronson Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, and Dorothea Dix. In mid-life Spear turned to the new revelation of spiritualism and came under the thrall of what he believed were spirit messages. Spear's spirits dictated that he and a small group of associates embark on plans for a perpetual motion machine, an electric ship propelled by psychic batteries, a vehicle that would levitate in the air, and a sewing machine that would work with no hands. As Buescher documents, Spear's spirit-guided efforts to harness technology to human liberation―sexual and otherwise―were far stranger than anyone outside his closest associates imagined, and were aimed at the eventual manufacturing of human beings and the improvement of the race. Buescher also examines the way in which Spear's story was minimized by his embarrassed fellow radicals. In the last years of his life, retired by the spirits and regarded by fellow Gilded Age progressives as a visitor from another age, if not another planet, Spear helped organize support for anarchist, socialist, peace, and labor causes. Buescher portrays Spear's life as an odd mixture of comic absurdity and serious foreshadowing of the future―for both good and ill―that provides us with a unique perspective on nineteenth-century American religious and social life.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction

380 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 2006

About the author

John Benedict Buescher, Ph.D. (Religious Studies, University of Virginia) was head of the Voice of America's Tibetan Broadcast Service, 1991–2007, and has been a contributor to The Catholic World Report since 2012.

Reviews

[Bill Wallace]

The relationship between progressive activism in the 19th Century and the practices of mesmerism and spiritualism gave birth to wonders, in this case The New Motor, a perpetual motion machine powered by spirits. John Murray Spear begins his adventures as an abolitionist, crusader for women’s rights, death penalty opponent, and general friend of the downtrodden and disadvantaged. The new mysticisms of the 1840s and 50s turn him into a mad wizard who receives engineering advice from spirits, including the ghost of Ben Franklin who guides him in the building of a magic motor which will revolutionize industry and faith.

Author Buescher tells this amazing story with style and flair, tracing Spear’s ascent and fall, though sex magic, spirit-driven archaeology, and a series of free-love scandals. Wonderful characters like Paschal Beverly Randolph and Victoria Woodhull take their turns on the spectral stage alongside the spirits and suckers. It’s a fantastic panorama of 19th Century manias played against the Civil War and its aftermath. Excellent and obscure history all around.

[BrokenEye, the True False Prophet]

This was a really fascinating book. John Murray Spear reminds me a lot of of Harvey's Elwood P. Dowd writ on a grander scale: undeniably delusional, but one of the nicest, kindest, most genuinely decent human beings you could ever hope to meet.

If you're looking for a creepy story about a cackling cultist who tried to build his own messiah out of mechanical parts, this isn't the book for you. However, if you're looking for a heartwarming but sad story about a selfless humanitarian who tried to build his own messiah out of mechanical parts... well, I'm not sure why you'd be looking for that, but this is it, and it's great.

[Autumn]

Spears is a fascinating subject. The book does a good job placing him in relation to the other reformers and spiritualists he worked with.