On landing in Mobile, Mrs. Hardinge was greeted by a large and enthusiastic body of friends, but found herself precluded, by legislative wisdom, from expounding the sublime truths of immortality in a city whose walls were placarded all over with bills announcing the arrival of Madame Leon, the celebrated “seeress and business clairvoyant, who would show the picture of your future husband, tell the successful numbers in lotteries, and enable any despairing lover to secure the affections of his heart’s idol,” etc. Side by side with these creditable but legalized exhibitions, were flaming announcements of “the humbug of Spiritualism exposed by Herr Marvel,” with a long list of all the astonishing feats which “this only genuine living wizard” would display for the benefit of the pious State where angelic ministry might not be spoken of.
Mrs. Hardinge passed through Mobile, leaving many warm hearts behind her, who would fain have exchanged these profane caricatures for the glad tidings which beloved spirit friends were ready to dispense to the world.
In passing through the capital city, Montgomery, a detention occurred of some hours, in forming a railway connection en route for Macon, Georgia, when Mrs. Hardinge and some friends travelling in her company, were induced to while away the tedious time by visiting the State House. The Legislature was not sitting that day, and one of the party, a Spiritualist, remarked that they were even then standing in the very chamber from which the recent obnoxious enactment against their faith had issued.
The day was warm, soft, and clear. The sweet southern breeze stirred a few solitary pines which waved on the capitol hill, and the scene from the windows of the legislative hall was pleasant, tranquil, and suggestive of calm but sluggish peace.
At that period—January, 1860—not an ominous murmur, not the faintest whisper, even, that the war spirit was abroad, and the legions of death and ruin were lighting their brands and sharpening their relentless swords to be drenched in the life-blood of millions, had made itself heard in the land.
The long cherished purposes of hate and fratricidal struggle were all shrouded in the depths of profound secrecy, and the whole southern country might have been represented in the scene of stillness and tranquility that lay outstretched before the eyes of the watchers, who stood in the State House of the capital city of Alabama, on that pleasant January afternoon.
There were present six persons besides the author, namely: Mr. and Mrs. Adams, of Tioga County, Pennsylvania; Mrs. Waters and her son, a Scotch lady and gentleman from Aberdeen; Mr. Halford, of New York City; and Mr. James, of Philadelphia. All but the mother and son from Scotland were acquainted with the author, and more or less sympathetic with her belief; all are now living, and willing to testify to what follows.
Suddenly Mrs. Hardinge became entranced, when the whole scene, laying outstretched before her eyes, appeared to become filled with long lines of glittering horse and foot soldiers, who, in martial pomp and military discipline, filed, rank after rank and regiment after regiment, through the streets of Montgomery, and then passed off into distance, and were lost to view.
Meantime the crash of military music seemed to thrill through the clairvoyant’s ears, at first merely marking the tramp of the vast bodies of infantry with a joyous rhythm, but anon, as it died off in their receding march, wild, agonizing shrieks commingled with its tones, and the thundering roll of the drums seemed to be muffled by deep, low, but heart-rending groans, as of human sufferers in their last mortal agony.
At length all was still again; the last gleam of the muskets flashed in the sunlight and melted away in the dim horizon; the last echo of the strangely mingled music and agony ceased, and then, over the whole radiant landscape, there stole an advancing army of clouds, like a march of tall gray columns, reaching from earth to the skies, and filling the air with such a dense and hideous gloom that the whole scene became swallowed up in the thick, serried folds of mist. In the midst of these cloudy legions, the eye of the seeress could discern innumerable forms who seemed to shiver and bend, as if in the whirl of a hidden tempest, and flitted restlessly hither and thither, aimless and hopeless, apparently driven by some invisible power from nothing to nowhere.