Rhode-Island Banner.
A Voice from the Land of Roger Williams.
1858 Weekly, semi-monthly
Providence, RI.
Editor: Horace A. Keach, editor and proprietor.
1/1, June 26, 1858.
50 cents a year, 4-8 pp.

This was an attempt, apparently short-lived, at a journal of general interest with strong spiritualist elements. "We shall reverence, but not blindly, the truths of a by-gone time. While we may contribute our humble influence to maintain the great conservative principles the Anglo-Saxon race have conquered, we shall quietly pen our views of modern movements in favor of the 'Good Time Coming.' We shall not make the opinion of the many the standard by which to try any question in Science, Philosophy, or Religion, but regard 'the collective dicta of the highest minds illuminated by the greatest knowledge' as the supreme law for our intellect, and the best rule of 'faith and practice.'" The journal was avowedly "Liberalist" in the jargon of the day, and imbued with the then new spiritualism, which was to all intents and purposes practically a subset of Liberalism until the two split in the late 1860s. The journal carried articles on "How Shall We 'Try the Spirits" and reports on a "Spiritual Lecture" on clairvoyance as a spiritual development, and many other notices of the doings of leading spiritualists and mediums, as well as advertisements for the likes of Dr. Charles H. Leffingwell a "Medium for the Refined Healing Influences of Spiritual Magnetism" and his wife who was a "Pictorial Medium: Mental Questions Answered by Symbols (All Charges Reasonable)." The December 4, 1858 issue contains one of Emma Hardinge [Britten's} first salvos against the wave of "Free Love" in spiritualism: "Miss Emma Hardinge has written a letter to the N.Y. Sunday Times, in which the advocates of 'Free Love' get some hard raps. Of the connection of this heresy with the New Dispensation, she says: 'Neither in the nature of spirit communion, spirit teachings, nor its: influence upon the world, can I find the leasf shadow of excuse for infidelity to the marriage relation, or any other of the social obligations of private or public." The journal also carried poems by Frances Harriet Whipple Green McDougall ("Fanny Green," 1805-1878), who had been born in Rhode Island and was involved in almost every one of the spiritualist journals and movements of the first quarter century of the movement. She was a universal reformer, poet, novelist, frequent editor and founder of spiritualist journals since editing the Univercoelum in the 1840s, temperance advocate, trance medium, abolitionist, suffragette, early proponent of the Christ/Christna debate, inventor (of an "Electro-Magnetic Girdle" under spirit influence), and author of a book of spirit communications from the recently deceased Paschal Beverly Randolph. American Antiquarian Society.

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