(1868)
THE GATES AJAR
After the Civil War, millions of Americans mourned and looked for ways to understand the mysteries of death. Brook Wilensky-Lanford tells the story of the forgotten bestselling novel The Gates Ajar, which brought the Spiritualist "thin veil" view of the afterlife into mainstream American religion.
According to legend, when President Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famous author of the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he said: “So, you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” Had Lincoln survived long enough to meet Elizabeth Stuart Phelps in 1868, he might have hailed her as the little woman who wrote the book that comforted the nation after the devastation of that great war. Phelps’s novel, The Gates Ajar, did not have memorable characters or a dramatic plot. What it did have was a mysterious power drawn from a nineteenth-century American religious tradition called Spiritualism.
Spiritualism is the nineteenth-century American name for the age-old practice of speaking to the dead. It had first become widely popular among ordinary Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. The beginnings of American Spiritualism are usually dated to the moment in 1848 when the Fox sisters of Rochester, New York, heard and returned a “knocking” from the spirit world.
Some would call Spiritualism a philosophy or a practice rather than a religion. It did not have the familiar trappings of religion: sacred scriptures, regular rituals, churches, and holidays. It did not demand of its practitioners exclusive loyalty: it was perfectly possible to be a Spiritualist and a good Christian. Nonetheless, Spiritualists shared a certain core set of ideas: God was a universal consciousness, an omnipresent, transcendent force that assured the eternal survival of all human souls.
The boundary between our world and the next world, the world of the living and the world of the dead, was permeable. Humans could ascend to heaven and speak with angels while still living; heaven and earth mirrored each other following the “law of correspondences.” Dead loved ones could descend into the room at a séance, through the “thin veil” between this world and the next, in order to communicate with the living.
Although Spiritualist organizations like the Church of Spiritualism and the National Spiritualist Association of Churches did eventually develop in the 1890s, for most of its American heyday, Spiritualism was a less organized religious movement. Spiritualism might have been unorganized, but it was wildly popular. Anyone might have or develop the ability to communicate through this veil. And just about anyone did: people held seances in their homes, flocked to trance lectures, joined Spiritualist circles, subscribed to Spiritualist publications, and had spirit photographs taken of themselves. Spiritualism was also egalitarian. It cut through many of the social divisions of nineteenth-century America: between men and women, rich and poor, even Black and white.
Soon there was a brisk trade in all things Spiritualist: mediums, spirit lectures, Spiritualist reading circles, meeting houses, books, journals, and events. Charles Partridge began publishing the Spiritualist Telegraph newspaper in 1852. By 1857, it claimed a circulation of over 5,000. Its competition, the Spiritualist Register, had an admittedly optimistic yet very specific tally of the number of Spiritualists in the US was 780,000, across 35 states, including 200,000 in New York State, 40,000 in New York City, 100,000 in Ohio and 75,000 in Massachusetts. “If among these are included those who are seeking spiritual evidence, with no other faith or hope, the number would be increased to 3,000,000.” The federal government made its own, more sober assessment in the 1890 census: it counted 334 Spiritualist organizations, with about 45,000 members.
The Civil War finally ended in 1865. An estimated 620,000 people had lost their lives, approximately 2 percent of the population at the time. And for the thousands upon thousands of Americans whose loved ones died in the war—whether in battle or from disease or infected injuries—the reckoning with their loss was just beginning, and it hit hard.
War had upended all kinds of traditional ideas about death—like the idea that one was supposed to die at home, in one’s own bed, surrounded by family, one’s last words assuring those loved ones of their belief in the Christian afterlife. In the Civil War, so many thousands of people were denied that traditional good death, dying far away in muddy battlefields, often without so much as a Bible to console them, sometimes buried in shallow, battlefield graves.
All of a sudden, all Americans had loved ones who had died too soon, with unfinished business about which it was urgent to communicate.
The Gates Ajar Cover
(1870 edition)
photograph by Brook Wilensky-Lanford
That’s where The Gates Ajar came in. This illustrated “cottage novel” about women and children mourning their war dead, by a young writer from Massachusetts named Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, appeared unassuming. It takes the form of a diary by a young Massachusetts woman, Mary Cabot, who is so distraught by the Civil War death of her beloved brother that she refuses to leave the house. She tries to get comfort from her hometown minister, the aptly named Reverend Bland. But Reverend Bland’s heaven is boring. He said “something about adoration, and the harpers harping with their harps,” Mary says, but “it bewildered and disheartened me so that I could scarcely listen to it.” She was even more disheartened when Reverend Bland expressed skepticism that Roy even made it to heaven, since he apparently had not been a regular churchgoer.
Fortunately, Mary’s Aunt Winifred soon comes to stay, bringing with her Spiritualist ideas of heaven. Spiritualist heaven is nearby—“I cannot doubt that our absent dead are very present with us”—and exciting. “Eternity will never become monotonous. Variety without end, charms unnumbered within charms, will be devised by Infinite ingenuity to minister to our delight.” Heaven is a bustling place much like earth, where people continue to work, develop their occupations and interests, and have access to everything they ever loved or wished for.
But most importantly, the Spiritualist heaven is open to everybody. “God has obviously not opened the gates which bar heaven from our sight, but he has just as obviously not shut them; they stand ajar…surely we should look in as far as we can…with reverence.” This is a heaven of family reunions. Our dead loved ones retain their identity, personality, and memories; we will continue our relationships with them after death. As Winifred put it, “God loves me, and he loves mine. And as long as we love Him, He will never separate himself from us, or us from each other.” The more Mary believes in this kind of afterlife, the more she is able to go on with her earthly life.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
photo by Petrina Jackson
MSS 6997-e.
Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature
University of Virginia
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps herself came from a long line of Protestant ministers and considered herself to be a devout Christian. There was also, however, Spiritualism in the family. The Stratford, Connecticut, home of Phelps’s grandfather Eliakim was locally renowned for being possessed by spirits in 1850; Elizabeth’s father, Austin, a Protestant theologian, spoke up in support of Eliakim’s spiritualist experiences, saying “the facts were real.” By the time Eliakim’s granddaughter published The Gates Ajar eighteen years later, Spiritualism was a regular feature of American religious life, which crossed surprising boundaries. White or Black; North or South; young or old; if you were not speaking to the dead, you knew people who were.
This novel about grief, which built on Spiritualist ideas about heaven, became a surprise bestseller—so popular that the book’s publisher later boasted that The Gates Ajar was the second-best-selling work of fiction of the nineteenth century, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This was no doubt an exaggeration, but it was an apparently plausible one. In its first full year in print, 1869, The Gates Ajar had to be reprinted 26 times. The number of copies sold, as well as the amount of money made by Phelps, were items of news interest across the nation. By October, a Jackson, Mississippi, paper noted that “‘Gates Ajar’ reached a sale of 40,000 copies.” In December, the Cairo Illinois Evening Bulletin claimed that “Miss Phelps has made $20,000 out of ‘Gates Ajar.’” As an ad in the Chicago Tribune gushed, “No book, for a long time, has taken such hold on the public as ‘The Gates Ajar.’” For Christmas, the publisher released a deluxe, illustrated edition.
By the end of 1869, the book was an acknowledged phenomenon. Whether one approved of the book’s message or not, one had to acknowledge that it had created a sensation. Soon, the very idea that an American reader had not heard of “the gates ajar” was the subject of several jokes widely repeated in newspapers, like the Washington Standard, for years to come. For example: “‘Did you ever see “Gates Ajar?”’ she yawningly asked her beau late Sunday night. ‘No’ he politely replied, ‘but I’ve seen [popular song] “Pull Down the Blinds.”’ And she snappishly remarked, ‘Not to-night you hain’t.’ He soon saw the front gate ajar.”
Newspaper Mentions of Gates Ajar
Library of Congress Chronicling America Collection
Critics then and now have often hated the book. In the 1870s, one wrote that Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s vision of heaven was “positively injurious to the cause of true religion” and suitable only for “drowsy, dead-beat Christians.” In the 1970s, literary scholar Ann Douglas claimed that Phelps’s book brought “horror to the collective theological world.” Part of a wider trend of “consolation literature,” she argued, the novel was really an “exercise in necrophilia,” which “inflated the importance of dying and the dead.”
But the “thousands” of grateful readers comforted by the book vastly outnumbered the naysayers. In her 1897 autobiography Chapters From a Life, Phelps devotes ten pages to describing the volume and tone of these letters, often using the metaphor of a storm:
The book was hardly under way before the storm of them set in. It began like a New England snowstorm, with a few large, earnest flakes; then came the whirl of them, big and little, sleet and rain, fast and furious, regular and irregular, scurrying and tumbling over each other through the Andover mails...It would not be very easy to make any one understand who had not been through a closely similar experience, just what it meant to live in the center of such a whirlwind of human suffering. It used to seem to me sometimes, at the end of a week’s reading of this large and painful mail, as if the whole world were one great outcry.
Even some of Phelps’s contemporary critics seemed to understand that the book could not be judged on ordinary literary criteria. In a disappointed review of one of Phelps’s later novels, The New York Herald fondly remembered The Gates Ajar, writing that Phelps’s most famous novel had been
remarkable because she gave to a grim, orthodox religion all the beauty and nearness which has long been the consolation of Swedenborgians and Spiritualists. She robbed death of its terrors and gave to grief so tender a sympathy as to cause sorrow-laden men and women to close the book with a “God bless her” upon their lips.
The Gates Ajar stayed in print, uninterrupted, for more than forty years, until Phelps’s death in 1911. There were translations, imitations, illustrated editions, and even a parody by Mark Twain. The book spawned two sequels from Phelps, and numerous imitations. Earlier books about heaven were even re-published with “Gates” in the title to capitalize on the Gates Ajar craze. The spinoffs were not limited to full-length books. In 1869, Helen L. Bostwick published a poem called “How the Gates Came Ajar,” which was soon set to music, and eventually reached a sale of 100,000 copies, ten times what was considered the standard for what makes a song “popular” at the time. The song spread to theatrical stages, including many theatrical productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, some of which soon began advertising a “Marvelous Gates Ajar” scenic effect as a grand finale. So why is it that while Americans have still heard of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, almost no one has heard of The Gates Ajar?
I think it is not because the book has fallen into obscurity, but because it succeeded so well that we take its ideas for granted. Gradually, the titular metaphor of the book became a reality. The gates of heaven, at which Christian tradition stationed Saint Peter’s judgement, now stood ajar, thanks to the Spiritualists and Aunt Winifred. Gradually, the very image of the “gates ajar” took on a life of its own, not directly connected to the novel but borrowing its unique title, and this sorrow-laden history.
The longest-lasting and most pervasive legacy of the “gates ajar” is the funeral flower arrangement, or, as they were often called during the nineteenth-century craze for ornate floral mourning objects, “floral offerings.” In the 1870s, Chicago florist John C. Craig claimed to be “the originator” of the “gates ajar” flowers; in the twenty-first century, they are trademarked by Florists’ Transworld Delivery (FTD) and available through any FTD florists. But what really spread their popularity was the 1881 funeral of President James Garfield.
19th-Century Spin-offs
According to numerous reports, when Garfield’s flower-draped casket lay in state in the Capitol rotunda, it was a “representation of the ‘Heavenly Gates Ajar’” that had been commissioned by Garfield’s Vermont Avenue Christian Church from DC florist Henry Pfister. Pfister had built a wire frame, shaped to represent a double gate. Onto the frame, Pfister wove a layer of ferns. He covered the gateposts in white rosebuds, yellow and white carnations, and jasmines, and topped each one with a round glass globe filled with the dried flower arrangement known as “immortelles.”
Accounts estimated that the gate was “large enough for a person to walk through if opened to their full extent.” One side of the gates “was slightly pulled open towards the line of people which passed by and admired them.” This “floral triumph” stood to the left and a little behind the casket, as if the President was poised to enter heaven. For the thousands of mourners that streamed by in single file, the floral gates literally framed the death of a beloved President.
Starting in the 1890s, the “gates ajar” flowers began to take root, literally and figuratively, as permanent or semi-permanent “attractions” in the public parks that were being built widely in the late nineteenth century. There are records of “gates ajar” topiary planted in Chicago; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Providence, Rhode Island. Near Colorado Springs, Colorado, a natural rock formation seemed to mimic the form of the floral gates: a steep, stair-like approach led to a landing where a person might stand in the gap between two large standing rocks. In the 1910s, stereographs and postcards were published of this “Gates Ajar.”
In the first decades of the twentieth century, a branch of the Black women’s fraternal society Sisters of the Mysterious Ten called the Gates Ajar Temple conducted funerals in the urban centers of the Great Migration. These groups had been founded before the Civil War and would all but disappear by the Great Depression. But during the Great Migration, typically dated from 1915 to 1918, the “gates ajar” accessible heaven reinscribed community in the face of death and distance, much as it had to the readers of the original 1868 book.
Today, if we think of Spiritualism at all, most Americans tend to think of Ouija boards, ghosts, and seances that are time-honored pop culture tropes. But the religion’s bigger impact on American culture is how it opened up our ideas of heaven—ideas that are so commonplace as to have become invisible. How was Clarence the angel able to move between heaven and earth in It’s A Wonderful Life? Why is it that so many New Yorker cartoons take place at the gates of heaven, where an avuncular Saint Peter offers an informal interview? Indeed, the gates ajar heaven has even permeated the visions of those Christians descended from the “Reverend Blands” of the world, the kind of readers who felt The Gates Ajar did damage to American Christianity; no matter that it was written by the daughter and granddaughter of Protestant theologians.
Heaven's Gates Imagery
For instance, see the early-2000s spate of Christian near-death-experience memoirs, many of which became films: 90 Minutes in Heaven, Heaven Is For Real, and The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven. That last one never had its movie made because its young co-author, Alex Malarkey, had a change of heart as a young teenager and decided that his “visit to heaven” could not have been real—not because heaven wasn’t real, but because the Bible does indeed say that no one can know what heaven looks like until they die, and to believe otherwise is blasphemous. Malarkey’s crisis of faith garnered a lot of press, much of it snide; but the real story was that the ability to cross into heaven through a thin veil, or through gates ajar, has so permeated American culture that it could go unremarked upon, even in conservative Christian circles.
Many new religious movements arose in the nineteenth-century US, a number of them in the famous “burned-over district” where the Fox sisters also lived, and often we look at them as curiosities, has-beens, and failures. But I contend that many of them have longer legacies than we realize, like the remnants of a now-obscure nineteenth-century bestseller written to comfort those who had lost loved ones in the Civil War, one whose central image, the gates ajar, starting immediately and lasting for more than a century now, has taken root in American culture.
SOURCES & FURTHER READINGS
If you'd like to read The Gates Ajar, it has recently been republished as a Penguin Classic. The topic of Spiritualism has long fascinated journalists and historians; of the many books available about this tradition, I highly recommend: Peter Manseau, The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost (HarperCollins, 2018); Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Indiana University Press, 2001); Emily C. Clark, The Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (The University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Tiffany J. Hopkins, Beyond: A Living Person's Guide to the Dead (Sterling Ethos, 2025); and Mira Ptacin, The In-Betweens: Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna (Liveright, 2019). For more about how the Civil War changed ideas of death in America, see Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2009). HEADER IMAGE CAPTION: Two women picnic near the Gates Ajar topiary in Como Park, St. Paul, 1908; the author’s collection. AUTHOR PHOTO CREDIT: Tammy Jean Lamoureux
Brook Wilensky-Lanford
is a religion writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of A God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America (2026) and Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, a 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; both are by Grove Press. A former managing editor of the twenty-five-year-old literary magazine Killing the Buddha, Brook's work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Currently the Associate Director of Sacred Writes Public Scholarship, she holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University, and a PhD in Religion in the Americas from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she lives.
