Achsa W. Sprague was an American spiritualist and author. She is noted for being a pioneer advocate of the spirtual philosophy in New England.
Background
Achsa was born around on November 17, 1827 on a farm at Plymouth Notch, Vermont, United States, the sixth child of Charles (died 1858) and Betsy Sprague (died 1868). She was a connection of William Sprague, 1830-1915, and of the stepmother of Calvin Coolidge, who describes the family of Achsa Sprague as "very intellectual but nervously unbalanced" (letter to the author).
When she was in the earlier stages of her illness, Sprague lost her brother Ephraim, and the town of Plymouth Notch experienced a loss of several townspeople to death for various reasons.
Career
At twelve Sprague began teaching in a rural school, but a scrofulous disease of the joints overtook her when she was about twenty, and though for a time she continued her duties in a crippled condition, she later became a bedridden invalid for about six years.
In 1854, having been restored to apparently normal health through the agency of "angelic powers, " she became a trance medium and later a lecturer on spiritualism, and addressed large audiences throughout the country.
She read widely in the poets and wrote voluminously, especially during the last few years of her life. Many of her compositions were produced by automatic writing - at the rate of 4, 600 lines in seventy-two hours on the first draft of "The Poet" - in which she believed herself to be under the control of divine and mystic energies.
Her poems, which display no careful craftsmanship, are spontaneous expressions of spiritual anguish and despair, appeals for economic justice and equality, or exultant affirmations of faith and hope. Only a very small part of what she produced is represented by her published books, I Still Live, A Poem for the Times (1862) and The Poet and Other Poems (1864).
Among her unpublished writings, which include essays, journals, and a play, is an autobiographical poem of 162 pages, which she composed in six days in such a nervous state that spinning-wheel, latches, and roosters were muffled for her peace of mind.
Sprague also wrote for Spiritualist newspapers such as The Banner of Light, The Green Mountain Sibyl, The Peoples World, and The World’s Paper.
In 1861, Sprague’s previous illness returned and began to affect her in a much more dramatic way. The time of traveling and bracing harsh winters had taken a toll on her body and weakened it for the second round of her illness. Achsa W. Sprague died a year later at the young age of thirty-four on July 6, 1862.
Views
Sprague was developing a reputation for being a strong, independent woman who often took on the role of a male when it came to public speaking in roles such as, for example, officiating public funeral services.
Known as the "preaching woman, " she opposed slavery, visited prisons in numerous cities and urged reforms, and condemned what she said was the contemporary belief that "woman must be either a slave or a butterfly. " She abandoned the materia medica of the day, experimented with magnetizing processes, with galvanic bands, with hypnotism, and with sensational seances, and came finally to a belief in mental healing, which with no strange physical manifestations had raised her almost instantly from her sick bed and seemed to her "the voice of God. "
During her lectures, she would go into trances and speak in different voices. She became a very high demand lecturer and people flocked to hear her speak. There were many Spiritualist towns that strongly believed that in order for their community to prosper and succeed, they needed Sprague to come and speak to their people. This truly shows the amount of impact that Sprague had on the Spiritualism world and how strong of a figure she was to the people.
Personality
She is represented by tradition as having a personality of rare charm; it is plain that she had a wide following.
From her diary writings, Sprague was showing signs of depression from her lamenting diary entries. She didn’t complain of pain, but she longed to return to her more able physical state.
Quotes from others about the person
Braude states that, “Before becoming a Spiritualist, Sprague became an expert on non-religious approaches to healing in antebellum America. She sought cures from a variety of practitioners, often traveling great distances to see a doctor reputed to have success with difficult cases. In addition to taking the medicine various doctors prescribed for her, she wore ‘galvanic bands’ for six weeks and was ‘magnetized’ repeatedly by a "psychologist".
Braude describes her popularity, “Within a few months of her first lecture, she was filling halls in Boston, where local Spiritualists implored her to extend her visit … From complete dependence, she attained a remarkable degree of independence for a woman of her day, supporting herself with lecture fees and traveling alone from state to state … Sprague embodied in her life the optimistic doctrines of her adopted faith”.