Charles Godfrey Leland attended Germantown Academy in the 1830’s, at a time when Bronson Alcott was headmaster. Leland bounced around among several schools, but GA was the only one he recalled with fondness, largely due to the kindness of Alcott. Leland went on to study at Princeton and in Europe, and his career intersected with many of the most significant events of the Nineteenth Century. He also pursued an interest in spiritualism and the occult, becoming America’s first significant author in what we would today call the fantasy genre, influencing such prominent writers as J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan), Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), and, through other English writers like Lord Dunsany and William Morris, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Leland told a story that shortly after his birth his nurse took him to the family attic and performed a ritual involving a Bible, a key, a knife, lighted candles, money and salt to ensure a long life as a "scholar and a wizard", a fact which his biographers have commented upon as foreshadowing his interest in folk traditions and magic. Many of Leland’s books were written with children as the intended audience, such as Johnnykins and the Goblins (1879) which explored the intersection where childhood imagination meets ancient folk tradition.

Leland was also an illustrator, providing drawings and engravings for the books he published. When the Civil War broke out, Leland offered his talents in support of the Union cause. He served as an editor for the Continental Monthly, a pro-Union journal popular among the army, and he published the Book of the Copperheads, a verse lampoon of Northern Democrats who supported a negotiated end to the war. Leland also provided comic caricatures for the Book, putting his talent for imaginative design to political use.

Perhaps Leland’s most significant contribution to the war was his decision to begin referring to the movement to end slavery as “Emancipation” rather than “Abolition.” By the 1860’s, most Americans had come to associate the term “Abolition” with dour, moralizing New Englanders, who also advocated such unpopular causes as the prohibition of alcohol and tobacco. Slave-owning Southerners saw the abolition movement as an effort to abolish their property rights. By changing the term to describe the anti-slavery movement to Emancipation, Leland freed the concept from its historical baggage. Who could object to freeing people unjustly held in servitude? Tellingly, Abraham Lincoln followed Leland’s usage in the first official legal proclamation to curtail slavery in 1863.

After spending a few years studying language and history at Princeton, Leland left for Europe to spend a few years studying folklore in Europe. While he was living in Paris, the Revolution of 1848 broke out. The idealistic Leland threw in with the rebels and fought on the barricades against government troops. He was named a Captain in the citizen’s militia.

Both before and after the Civil War, Leland traveled extensively in the European countryside, publishing some of the first scholarly studies of the group known traditionally as the Gypsies (and known today as the Roma). In 1899, Leland claimed to have been presented an ancient manuscript by an old Italian woman which contained the lore of folk magical traditions. His publication of Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches became his most famous work. The Neopagan traditions outlined by Leland in Aradia became the basis for much of the modern Wicca and New Age Spirituality movements. He himself was a follower of the beliefs he described, becoming perhaps the most famous American pagan of the nineteenth century.