[Editorial Note: Benjamin Franklin Hatch published this pamphlet some time in early 1859. He wrote in haste, but at considerable length. Much of what he said was repetitious and, in excerpting his work, I have eliminated that material. Otherwise I have followed his organization and have made few editorial changes. On several occasions I have inserted a word in brackets where I felt it was needed. I have not corrected any typographical errors or mistakes in punctuation.
Hatch's motive seems to have been to revenge himself upon those he blamed for the break-up of his marriage, on the one hand, and to defend himself from attacks made in Cora Hatch's complaint filed in New York's Supreme Court, on the other. His account of his marriage to Cora is at least as partisan, and as open to doubt, as her complaint. That does not make it uninteresting as a historical source, however.
Hatch's "unmasking" of Spiritualists echoed, albeit in sensationalized form, the usual charges against them. Their capital crime, for him and for others, was the doctrine of Free Love. In its train came a whole series of other evils, including most species of fraud. But Hatch continued to insist, unlike most who "unmasked" Spiritualists, that contact with spirits was real. Mediumship itself was not a fraud. It was the controlling spirit-guides who defrauded, starting with the medium him or herself.
Could Hatch actually have believed this? He had, by his own account, been involved in spiritualism almost from its beginning. In the years before he met Cora L. V. Scott he had himself been a magnetic physician, i.e., one who promised cures by realigning the "poles" of patients. He was, that is, a mesmerist. And his understanding of spiritualism arose directly out of his practice of mesmerism.
Anton Mesmer had claimed, in the late eighteenth century, that there were magnetic fields in all living creatures and that illness arose when the proper "flow" of the magnetic "forces" was somehow disrupted. He proposed a therapy based upon techniques for returning order to the disrupted fields. The magnetic force was invisible of course. There was no way to measure it. Mesmerism, in short, was a scientific example of the fable of the emperor's new clothes, requiring a belief in what could not be seen.
What could be seen, however, was the inexplicable ability of the mesmerist to place some subjects into a trance. However imaginary "animal magnetism" might be, hypnotism was real. And the mesmerist had an awesome power to influence the emotions, ideas, and behavior of the subject. One mind could enter into another's and take control. This was, as Hatch points out, a fact.
How could one explain this fact? Science still provides no help. Hypnotism remains a purely empirical activity. Practitioners know, from experience, how to put subjects into trances and how to bring them out again. Neither they nor anyone else knows how, or why, these techniques work. Hatch, like many of his contemporaries, believed there was some kind of force, analogous to electricity and/or magnetism, but more "subtle," passing from mind to mind. This was, as he forcibly pointed out in this pamphlet, the central contention of Spiritualists. It was possible to communicate with the dead because spirits could enter into the mind of a medium in precisely the same fashion the mesmerist "controlled" the subject.
Who was to control Cora? This was the question that drove Hatch. He stated, in the chapter on their divorce, that he and former New York State Supreme Court judge John Worth Edmonds came up with a plan which would return "control" of Cora to him. When the plan backfired, Hatch blamed Edmonds for tricking him. But should we take the notion of "control" so literally? Hatch told in the chapter on the "Practical Workings of Spiritualism" an anecdote about himself and Cora just after their marriage. In the presence of another couple he hypnotized her,1 put a ring on her finger, planted the suggestion that when she awoke she would be unaware of it, brought her out of the trance, and tried to call it to her attention. This was a parlor trick, presumably intended to show his powers to his acquaintances. But it is hard to believe it was a singular occurence. Hatch had controlled Cora and wanted to again. When he could not, he asked himself: Who is controlling her? The most probable answer, that she was controlling herself, did not occur to him.]