Spiritual Reporter, The.
Spiritualism is the Religion of the Soul: embraces Science, Art, Education, Reform, Philosophy--pertains to God, Nature and Humanity
1867 Weekly
Chicago, IL. Publisher: W.F. Jamieson. Editor: W.F. Jamieson.
1/1, 1867. $1.50 a year, 12 pp.

The Religio-Philosophical Journal, December 29, 1866, says that this was to be the vehicle for preserving the best of oral spiritualist communications (lectures and speeches). Some of these were "Phonographically Reported" for the journal and some simply reported from the notes of those in attendance. Six issues at least were published, giving lectures by Henry T. Child, P.B. Randolph, H. Green, Seth Paine, J.S. Loveland, and E. Whipple, of which all except the last survive. W.F. Jamieson, of Albion, Calhoun County, Michigan, began his career as a spiritualist lecturer in the 1850s, and was still going strong in 1877 when he used a "special oxy-calcium stereopticon" to show scenes of the spirit world during his lectures. Jamieson was prominent in the "Universal Association of Spiritualists" in 1874 which tried to draw together what the Banner of Light called "all Spiritualists, Socialists, Infidels, Materialists, Free Religionists and Free thinkers" which broadly encompassed the free-love wing of spiritualism: Victoria C. Woodhull, Moses Hull, Lois Waisbrooker, Cephas B. Lynn, Benjamin Todd, E.H. Heywood, Marion Todd, E.V. Wilson, Warren Chase, Laura Cuppy Smith, and Lyman C. Howe. Jamieson's proclivities in this regard may be seen in P.B. Randolph's accusation that Jamieson had "corrupted" his then wife while Randolph was on the lecture circuit. In his early days he was a phenomenal medium but turned to lecturing and editing various spiritualist journals after he was caught red-handed in fraud when a light was struck during one of his seances. This prompted the old debunker Amos Craft to comment that "[t]he exploded medium often becomes a lecturer or editor of a spiritualist paper; sometimes he reforms and returns to more honorable avocations." By 1880, as Mind and Matter gloated, Jamieson had, like so many others, taken to the lecture circuits to denounce spiritualism as a fraud--though, again like many others, he wavered between agnosticism and disbelief. Jamieson started this journal at the same time as he was helping start the Spiritual Republic, the short-lived attempt of the radicals to supplant the Religio-Philosophical Journal, and went on to publish or edit the Spiritual Rostrum, Present Age, Hull's Crucible and the Lake Pepin Gazette, one of the "critical" spiritualist journals. Amherst College; Chicago History Museum, vol. 1, nos. 7, 11-13, 16.

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