The utopianism which, along with amateurism, tinged many women’s charitable causes before the war shaded over into a rich variety of crank enthusiasms for health and diet fads, dress reform, and spiritualism, and these too were legacies of Barton’s antebellum past she never grew beyond. In later years she fell under the sway of a spiritualist, who, reading her subject without difficulty, conducted seances for her at which Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Kaiser Wilhelm spoke from the other side to praise her work and assure her of her lasting fame, all of which
