The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (8 page)

New England’s anti-slavery women rolled with vigor, outraged over rape, torture, murder, and selling little children. They bristled with new ideas, creative solutions. They demanded equality before the law and argued openly about Christianity and God. They negotiated and petitioned legislatures, the governor, and the president. They argued what to do about slavery. Then they took action, some buying slaves’ freedom, educating them, even sending them off to Oberlin College.

Sixty-year-old Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who lived in Concord, about twenty miles northwest of Boston, stirred a wide-ranging brew of ideas and information. Sister-in-law to novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and to the late educator / politician Horace Mann, she had founded a bookshop in Boston where she hosted the Transcendentalist gatherings and helped publish their magazine,
The Dial.
Intentions meaning more to her than invitations, she could inject herself abruptly. She protested when fellow abolitionists paid no attention to the hanging of John Brown’s colored followers. Deciding that President Lincoln was not running the war well, she went to see him. Her sympathy for poor people, colored Americans, and Indians endlessly drew her into struggles on their behalf. Excited by fresh perspectives, she even studied sculpture for a while.

Edmonia must have wobbled uneasily before the older woman’s intensity. She fell back on her familiar facade, the child of the forest. She laid out her romance of growing up “wild,” of arriving penniless in Boston. She told of eating her last crackers on City Hall steps until the tribute to Ben Franklin caught her eye. Whatever it was she said and did, she caught Miss Peabody’s imagination and, with it, a loyalty that would set Miss Peabody apart from other fans.

Despite the sympathies of many New England artists, the features of black Africans were as rare in literary sculpture as Swahili greetings in the King James Bible. Ancient Olympus had no such gods or goddesses to guide these Greek revivalists. Only the controversial tabletop group, the foot-high
Slave Auction
modeled in 1859 by Salem-born John Rogers, featured colored people. It portrayed an angry, terrified slave family – father, mother, and infants – as they were bid out by an auctioneer slyly sporting a Devilish tail. Shopkeepers refused to sell it. Antislavery people purchased copies from a colored street vendor and showed them off to express their outrage.

Trained as an engineer, Rogers cast plaster copies of the
Slave Auction
and more amiable scenes in Boston (eventually by the hundreds in a New York factory). He patented them and painted them before selling them. His popular pricing and folksy realism, similar to the twentieth-century
Saturday Evening Post
covers of Norman Rockwell, ran counter to the bookish intent of the Greek revival. Snobs sniffed and counted him beyond the esteem accorded to sculptors of monuments in more durable metal and stone.

One day, Edmonia learned about a sculptor creating a figure called
Africa Awakening.
Curious, she sought out Anne Whitney and her work. For the first time, Edmonia saw a black woman idealized in clay, the first step to marble immortality. Anne’s life-size work in progress was in the basement of the Athenæum. Nude above the thighs, the supple young woman’s breasts adjusted to gravity as she rose on her left elbow. Her right hand shielded her eyes, which seemed to peer into the future. A Biblical phrase appeared at the base: “And Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God.”

Anne’s approach was idealistic and mild, unlike the pathos of the
Slave Auction.
It also differed substantially from the straightforward kind of portrait likeness Edmonia was attempting. It romanticized the beauty and promise of the African people. The figure was as innocent and voluptuous as any Greek
Venus
was. The hair, thickly braided, was clearly black African in quality. The face, Anne said, was not finished.
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Part of its impact lay in its innovation – showing the colored woman as important and beautiful, a worthy subject of art – and that a single image could represent all the black African people. Edmonia had never heard of such a statue. No one had.

Anne was intrigued by Edmonia. Here stood her theme in the flesh: strong, alert, full of promise, and curious about her future. She could have told Edmonia she based the torso on modeling by a nineteen-year-old white girl.
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Use of nude models was rare in America at the time, particularly by female artists whose eyes were to be as sheltered as their bodies. One day, she would construct a half nude
Toussaint L'Ouverture
as he sat in his cell, sad and resigned to the will of God. It was another example of her bold feminist adventuring.

Twice Edmonia’s age and equally petite, Anne was born into an old, well to do family in nearby Watertown. She was a published poet when she took up painting. She studied in Boston, Munich, and Paris. When the man she favored renounced marriage, fearing insanity in his family, she was terribly disappointed. She then deleted all traces of sexual feeling from her writing. She never married. One day, as she cleaned up spilled mud in a greenhouse, she discovered the fun of modeling shapes. She soon turned to sculpture. She studied anatomy at a hospital and took private lessons.

In 1854, she went to Brooklyn, NY, to study sculpture.
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Adeline M. Manning, a painter fourteen years her junior, became her ardent fan. They eventually lived together forever.

It was a “Boston marriage.” The bond sustained the character of strong, affectionate mother-daughter connections, creating an intimate feminine world. It was one of few options for respectable young women facing the shortage of eligible men in New England. With inferior status, poor sex education, a shortage of men, the most vague political power, and an agreed distrust of male insensitivity, they gladly spent most of their time separated from men anyway.

As a former schoolteacher with years of training, Anne must have been as amused as she was impressed by Edmonia. Her letters reveal tactful silences and demands to keep her gossip private. She also smiled at – indeed, was disbelieving of – Edmonia’s overtly humble pose.

At her workbench, she added to Edmonia’s basic information. She discussed the characteristics of certain clays and demonstrated how to knead them. She made suggestions on modeling. She also introduced her to a plaster expert who was so taken with her
Voltaire
bust he put it in plaster free of charge.

John Brown’s use of colored men with guns to raid the arsenal in Virginia was particularly irritating to the defenders of white advantage. Now an entire African-American regiment gathered outside Boston, dedicated and deadly. Getting ready to rush rebel strongholds, they trained as the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Volunteer Infantry.

Col. Robert Gould Shaw, the handsome young son of a prominent Brahmin family, led them. He had fought for the Union since 1861. Raised among dedicated abolitionists, he was not much older than Edmonia.

Late in May, Edmonia learned the regiment would parade on Boston Common as they went to war. She likely squeezed through the crowd to see what no one ever saw before – colored men in uniform, armed and ready to fight. In their cadenced formations, the solemn warriors sang “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave” to the tune of a now-forgotten camp song. “John Brown died that the slave might be free” was their anthem. Thrilled onlookers sang along. One of the largest contingents came from Oberlin. She could easily recognize each Oberlin soldier.

Frederick Douglass appeared on the sidelines. How much did he know of her ordeal at Oberlin? How much might he tell? Might he poison her new friendships?

She need not have worried. He was interested only in good news about her. He had visited the camp to cheer on the soldiers and wish them Godspeed. His sons were among them.

The scene, recognized at once as historic, shook the city. The abolitionists of Boston waved and prayed while others stayed home. The newly minted soldiers radiated strength. Brass buttons and lethal bayonets glinted against the dark blue jackets.

Col. Shaw led on a fine horse as they marched to the harbor. He rode tall in the saddle, fascinating everyone. He was about to risk his life for slaves. He was as resolute as old John Brown was on the eve of his famous raid.

It excited a new kinship in Edmonia’s heart. From the hushed ways in which people spoke of him, she came to understand he could have obtained a safe commission in Washington.

His father, a retired banker, had moved the family to an elite community on Staten Island before the war. Young Shaw stayed back to attend Harvard, later clerking in New York City. Then he volunteered. Folks said he cut short his honeymoon to cast his lot with colored men and their fight for freedom. When news reached Boston that any white officer leading colored troops would be put to death, he did not blink.

Poet John Greenleaf Whittier, a Quaker and pacifist, one day recalled his feelings about that day in a private letter.

The only regiment I ever looked upon during the war was the 54th, on its departure for the South. I shall never forget the scene. As he rode at the head of his troops, the very flower of grace and chivalry, he seemed to me beautiful and awful as an angel of God come down to lead the host of freedom to victory.
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The regiment sailed under a full moon, heading directly to South Carolina and the battlefront. New York police had warned they could not protect them from angry mobs. The cotton trade was important to New York’s economy and the draft added a source of hostility against the war and colored people.

Two months later, New Yorkers rioted, so crazed they even ripped up railroad tracks. Crying, “Murder the damned monkeys,” and “Wring the necks of the damned Lincolnites,” they lynched eleven blacks and burned the Colored Orphan Asylum to the ground. Rev. Garnet fled for his life as the demented mob searched for him in vain. His daughter probably saved his life by ripping the brass nameplate off his door with an axe.

Boston’s heroes fell
on July 18, 1863
. Everyone knew Fort Wagner, the main defense of Charleston’s harbor, was well armed, surrounded by difficult terrain, and briskly defended. It easily resisted earlier attacks, inflicting hundreds of casualties.

The Fifty-fourth had led the charge, the post of extreme honor. They met death inches from the rebel ramparts. The legend of its fearless color guard under fire would inspire pride and prayers. Regiments from Connecticut, Maine, and New Hampshire had followed – all with great losses.

Colored men marked their courage in blood as red as any other. Until then, many people believed they were too servile to fight as soldiers. Their sacrifice signified the entrance of a powerful new force and the hope it would tip the balance in favor of the Union.

Boston mourned. The sparse news was already a week old. It was weeks before more details appeared in the newspapers. Then word came that the Confederate general ordered Shaw “buried with his niggers” – a phrase that quickly became a Union rallying cry. Shaw’s limp remains, stripped and piled with the cold bodies of his troops, shared a brotherly grave in South Carolina sand.

Shaw’s father responded, that was what their son would have desired. Whittier summed up feelings of the day: “
I know of nothing nobler or grander than the heroic self-sacrifice of young Colonel Shaw.
”
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Boston wept afresh. He was a local boy with eighty-five first cousins. Well known around town, he was celebrated for his noble character. The mood was far darker than it was at Oberlin after John Brown’s hanging.

Edmonia, burning with anger and youthful ambition, surely burst with the need to join in, to express herself in clay. Summer cooled to winter before she created a “clever”
John Brown
in relief.
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She worked on Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Eventually, she produced recognizable likenesses, although clearly
Brown
was her favorite and the best. By November, Mr. Garrison helped by promoting her medallions – personal, affordable memorials to the martyred radical – in the
Liberator.
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Fort Wagner became old news for most of Boston. Union forces occupied it by September after a relentless blockade. The nearby city of Charleston, which had arrested its free colored men and put them to work as slaves, refused to surrender.

Nor would Edmonia give up her goal. She lived frugally, dependent on her allowance and the few dollars she got for her plaster portraits. She sold them out of a basket at Union rallies and churches. Pleased with sales of
John Brown,
she ordered more copies. Then she returned to Shaw, begging photos of him and sketching in clay.

Six months after Shaw’s death, a group of abolitionists met at Tremont Temple, Boston’s first racially integrated place of worship. They celebrated the first anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Among those present were Wendell Phillips, Whittier, and evangelist Theodore Weld who was a disciple of Rev. Finney and a leading abolitionist in his own right.

Affectionately described by Whittier as wearing “a plain cheap dress glorified by the generous motive for which she wore it,”
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Lydia Maria Child swirled through the crowded room. In a day when most women were church mice, she was a radical bugler, a clever provocateur.

Decades before, she shined as the foremost literary woman of America, author of books and editor of a popular children’s magazine. Then in 1833 she published a bold and militant
Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans.
It opened eyes and converted many readers to her radical views. It shocked and offended many more.

Sacrificing commercial success, she welcomed a humble existence while towering morally. She dwelt with her husband in Wayland, about twenty miles from Boston, coming to town for special events. Not a public speaker, she excelled in the written word. Face to face, she often preferred to ask questions.