The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (60 page)

NOTES FOR 28. BUSINESS – 1872 to 1873

[481]
Henry Robertson Sandbach, Diary, Feb. 8, 1872, (Powys County Archives, M/D/SAND/1/19) quoted in National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, Bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, accessed Mar. 22, 2010, http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/collections/foreign/longfellow_edmonia_lewis.asp

[482]
Cincinnati (OH) Enquirer,
Aug. 19, 1872, reported, “Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptor of Boston, is for Greeley because he is a handsome man;” the bust is mentioned in NYT, May 17, 1873; NYT, Sept. 25, 1879;
Boston (MA) Daily Traveller,
Nov. 17, 1880.

[483]
NYT, Marine Intelligence, June 7, 1872, lists “Miss Lewis” arriving on the French Line
SS St. Laurent
from le Havre.

[484]
Eric Foner,
Reconstruction, America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1868-1877
(New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 503-510.

[485]
Peter S. Porter (1820?-1884). Cf. NYT, “Funeral of Peter S. Porter,” July 28, 1884; New York City directory (1874), 1033. “Porter, Peter S., [boarding house], 252 W. 26th.”

[486]
Edmonia to E. G. Squier, Oct. 24, 1872, Microfilm reel 5, E. G. Squier Papers, Library of Congress. See also Madeleine B. Stern,
Purple Passage: the Life of Mrs. Frank Leslie
(University of Oklahoma Press, 1953), 55-66. Leslie and Squier suffered their own distraction. Having divorced his wife on July 18, Frank Leslie embarked on an affair with Mrs. Squier who then divorced her husband, accusing
him
of adultery.

[487]
Cleveland,
Story,
109-110, put the visit at June 30, 1873. Cecilia Cleveland, a Catholic, was the daughter of Horace Greeley’s sister, Esther.

[488]
Bryan (OH) Times,
General News, July 17, 1873.

[489]
Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman and A. C. Wyman,
Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 1806-1899: Her Life and its Environment
(Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1914), II, 37-38. Chace was a third-generation abolitionist, a Quaker, and a leader in the women’s movement. See also Smithsonian American Art Museum, Young Octavian. http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=14633 (last visited Mar. 22, 2010). Other sculptors who copied the bust included Horatio Greenough, Hosmer, Saint-Gaudens, and Thomas Crawford.

[490]
Wayman and Wayman, op. cit., 42-43: “Sarah Remond … is winning a fine position in Florence as a physician, and also socially; although she says Americans have used their influence to prevent her, by bringing their hateful prejudices over here.” Sarah and her brother Charles Lenox Remond were skilled anti-slavery speakers. Sarah left London for Florence, where she entered medical school, in 1866, the year Edmonia moved on to Rome.

[491]
Indianapolis (IN) News,
Nov. 18, 1878.

[492]
Ibid. Cf.
New Bedford (MA) Daily Mercury,
“The bust of Dio Lewis,” Feb. 20, 1868.

[493]
Whitney to Sarah Whitney, Sept. 20, 1872, Whitney MSS. Payne MSS, 766, noted the visit of Miss Minns to Rome March 8, 1869. (Edmonia visited Boston a few months later.) Meg L. Winslow, Mount Auburn Cemetery, to author July 23, 2008, re plot 4009 on Indian Ridge Path: Frances A[ntoinette] Minns and Constant F. Minns, who died earlier, were both buried Dec. 23, 1870. Whitney had moved back to Boston in 1871 and opened a studio in Louisburg Square.

[494]
St. Louis (MO) Post and Dispatch,
Jan. 23, 1879;
St. Louis (MO) Times-Journal,
Jan. 24, 1879, reprinted NYT,
Marion (OH) Daily Star, Lowell (MA) Sun, Springfield (MA) Daily Republican,
and SFPaA, which credited “a Chicago paper.”

[495]
Calvary Cemetery
g
raves include
those of
General Sherman, Missouri Governor Alexander McNair, and Dred Scott.

[496]
See also Julie Winch, introduction to
Cyprian Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis
(Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 13, 26; Loren Schweninger, introduction to James Peck Thomas,
From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur. The Autobiography
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 11-12.
Thomas mentioned his wife only in reference to his courtship; he gave no hint of his history with Edmonia.

[497]
James Peck Thomas, op. cit., 179-195. Thomas sailed for Liverpool in early June 1873.

[498]
Francis Silas Chatard was rector from 1868 to 1878.

[499]
Oberlin College purchased the
Thomas
bust in 2002. See also Flotte, “Edmonia Lewis,” which described restoring it. See also John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger,
In Search of the Promised Land. Slave Family in the Old South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 19, 240-241. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that all people of African descent could never be U.S. citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment overruled it in 1868.

[500]
St. Louis (MO) Globe-Democrat,
“Suit About the Blessed Virgin,” Jan. 25, 1879, reported James Thomas testified, “Edmonia Lewis made the model of clay at his house.”

[501]
St. Louis (MO) Globe-Democrat,
Jan. 23, 1879. For more serious coverage of the work and the dispute, see
St. Louis (MO) Post and Dispatch,
Jan. 23, 1879:

the crown of thorns was not on the statue but was lying around. There is only one kind of stone in the statue and a different kind in the pedestal….; took the dimensions of the figure; it is four feet eight inches from the foot to the head; from the foot to the top of the cross it is five feet two inches; the cross and the figure of the same kind of marble but of two pieces. They were joined together by an even joint… one arm of the Virgin was a little shorter than the other;

See also
St. Louis (MO) Republican,
“Colored Sculptress,” Jan. 24, 1879: “the Virgin standing beside the cross, the whole mounted on an octagonal pedestal;”
St. Louis (MO) Globe-Democrat,
“Suit About the Blessed Virgin,” Jan. 25, 1879: “the crown of jewels was made of metal instead of marble, and detached from the cross … the cross had no roses on it.”

[502]
St. Louis (MO) Times-Journal,
Jan. 24, 1879, excerpted by NYT and SFPaA, citing a Chicago paper.

[503]
St. Louis (MO) Post and Dispatch,
Jan. 23, 1879, reported Edmonia’s deposition specified Mrs. Thomas’s approval of the clay model.

[504]
NYT, “Miss Edmonia Lewis Gains a Suit,” Apr. 25, 1880, attributed to the
St. Louis Times.

[505]
BDET, Nov. 15, 1881:

The litigation concerning a statue of the Virgin made by Edmonia Lewis, the negro sculptress for James P. Thompson [
sic
Thomas] of St. Louis, has ended in a victory for Miss Lewis; but it is rather a barren one, for the judge decided that from the $635 due for the work must be deducted $228 overcharge for packing and the remainder will no more than pay her lawyers. When the statue arrived in St. Lewis, Mrs. Thompson [
sic
Thomas] paid an accompanying bill of $650, supposing that it covered everything, but it was only for freightage and packing, and the charge of $635 for the carving was separate. For wining
[sic]
the marble in wood fibre and boxing it, in the usual manner, Miss Lewis’s price was $235, and it was this item that the judge reduced to $7.

[506]
Mrs. Jeanne Besselsen, associate director, Catholic Cemeteries, Archdiocese of St. Louis, Jan. 24, 2006.

NOTES FOR 29. MEDIA – 1873

[507]
Anne Whitney to Sarah Whitney. Jan. 14, 1871, Wellesley College Archives.

[508]
Alfred C. Barnes, European travel account. Rare books and manuscripts. Penn State University Libraries. (#2001-0118R/A-S Mss. Book)1, May 5, 1873, p. 2.33-2.34. Not to be confused with the founder of the Barnes Foundation, Alfred Cutler Barnes became president of his father’s firm, A. S. Barnes, publishers, in 1868.

[509]
NYT, May 17, 1873. In Montana, Iowa and possibly elsewhere, the portion on Edmonia was excerpted as “A Colored Sculptress.”

[510]
Henry G. Stebbins visited Rome in 1868.

[511]
The Lincoln bust is described and illustrated in Buick,
Child of the Fire,
22-24, plate 3-4. See also NYT, “Destruction in the Park,” Jan. 3, 1881: “The historical buildings at Mount St. Vincent, in the Central Park, at East One Hundred and Third-street, were totally destroyed by fire …. The marble bust of Lincoln, by Edmonia Lewis, the colored sculptress, was saved.”

[512]
Cleveland,
Story,
110; NYT, “Passengers Arrived,” July 6, 1873, noted “Mrs. Edmonia Lewis” arrived on the French Line steamship
around
June 17.

[513]
NYDG, edited by journalist David Goodman Croly, started in Mar. 1873. Croly had coined the word “miscegenation” meaning racial mixing. Many states had banned marriage of whites with other races since colonial times without addressing the sexual abuse of slaves.

[514]
NYDG, July 10, 1873. Edmonia mentioned Garrison, Brackett, Shaw, Hosmer, Powers, Cushman, Bute, and others.

[515]
NYT, obituary, June 28, 1873, “The Late Hiram Powers,” July 2, 1873. Powers died June 27, 1873. Cf. Katherine C. Walker, “American Studios in Rome and Florence,”
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,
June 1866, 101-105, Powers proclaimed his national loyalty included a preference for American clay, which he regularly ordered.

[516]
ChT, July 15, 1873. The article was also excerpted by
Fort Wayne (IN) Gazette,
WoJ, BrDE, SFPaA, WoJ.

[517]
NNEra, “Edmonia Lewis is very busy,” May 23, 1873, 2.

[518]
Frederick Douglass, editorial, “Miss Edmonia Lewis.”

NOTES FOR 30. TRAVEL CROSS-CONTINENT

[519]
San Francisco (CA) News Letter,
Men We Know: “William Alvord,” Sept. 23, 1876.

[520]
SFDEB, Feb. 8, 1872, July 20, 1872, repeated in
Weekly Salt Lake City
(UT)
Daily Tribune, Folio: a Monthly Journal of Music, Drama, Art and Literature, New Orleans (LA) Picayune,
and
New York (NY) American Missionary.
(In our sources, she never claimed receiving more than $3,000 for a Madonna and Child for the Marquis of Bute in 1869 and $3,000 for Hagar sold by raffle in Chicago, for her artwork.) See also SFDEB, Apr. 27, 1872; Sept. 28, 1872; Oct. 26, 1872.

[521]
SFDEB, Personal Items, Apr. 5, 1873, repeated DKJ and
Monroe (WI) Liberal Press.
 

[522]
SFPaA, “Edmonia Lewis,” Oct. 15, 1870.

[523]
SFEl, “The Statuary of Miss Edmonia Lewis,” June 12, 1868. See also Jennie Carter, letter to the editor, SFEl, May 15, 1868, reprinted by Eric Gardner,
Jennie Carter: a Black Journalist of the Early West
(University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 33; SFEl, June 21, 1867, cited in P. M. Montesano,
Some Aspects of the Negro Question in San Francisco, 1849-1870
(San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1973).

[524]
SFDMC, Arrivals at the Hotels, Aug. 23, 1873.

[525]
SFC, Aug. 26, 1873.

[526]
San Francisco Art Association, Minutes, cited in Montesano, Some Aspects, 68.

[527]
For example, an ad from the SFEl, August or September 1873, reproduced in Wolfe,
Edmonia Lewis,
87, recognized her mission: “[it] cannot but fill our hearts with pride as a contradiction of the assertions that we have never produced an artist of true genius
.
”

[528]
SFPaA, Aug. 30, 1873.

[529]
SFDEB, Aug. 28, 1873.

[530]
SFDMC, Statuary and Paintings, Aug. 30, 1873.

[531]
Popular in Italy, where they are called
putti
[little boys], they portray nude male infants.

[532]
SFC, Sept. 3, 1873.

[533]
SFEl, Sept. 6, 1873.

[534]
SFDEB, Sept. 6, 1873. “The lowest acceptable bids are as follows: ‘Hiawatha’s Marriage,’ $550; bust of Lincoln, $550; ‘Asleep,’ $650; ‘Awake,’ $500; ‘Love in a Trap,’ $500.” It added, “Her pleasant face and gentle attractive manners are as interesting to many as the work of her hands.”