The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis: A Narrative Biography

By Harry Henderson and Albert Henderson

www.edmonialewis.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: EsquilineHillPress
• Release date: Dec 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781588634528

Book preview

continued

The Indomitable Spirit of

EDMONIA LEWIS

A Narrative Biography

By Harry Henderson and Albert Henderson

Esquiline Hill Press

Milford CT

Made in the United States of America

Contact: ah at edmonialewis.com

www.edmonialewis.com

© 2012 Albert K Henderson. All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher.

Cover design: Theodore Leon Henderson

ISBN 978-1-58863-451-1 PDF Electronic Book

ISBN 978-1-58863-452-8 EPUB Electronic Book

Suggested Cataloging[1]

DEDICATION AND INTRODUCTION

This book is dedicated to the late Romare Howard Bearden, a distinguished African-American humanist and one of the most creative artists of his century. Bearden and my father, a professional writer, decided in 1987 it would be the third venture of a successful partnership dating to the 1960s.[2] Bearden’s name would grace the title page but for the mortal limit that halted his contribution too long ago.

Based on their twenty-year friendship, Bearden had recruited my father to help him rectify a glaring omission in cultural resources. Barely a word about important African Americans appeared in the canons of art history. Together they pioneered research and wrote biographies to remedy the gap. They published Six Black Masters of American Art in 1972 (Doubleday) and the landmark, 542-page tome, A History of African-American Artists from 1792 to the Present in 1993 (Pantheon).[3] Thus they set forth the lives of more than fifty important artists.

Among the artists they investigated, one stood out, unique in American history and celebrated beyond the world of art: Edmonia Lewis.

Simply calling her exceptional is a gross understatement, like saying the Louvre collects wonderful paintings. She was a gatecrasher in the elite world of fine art and a self-made woman. She found fame and prospered at a time when wealthy white women had few legal rights; colored women, rich or poor, had less to none.

As a racial, social, and cultural outsider, she labored to harmonize with Victorian society as a model of decorum while balancing pride in her heritage and taking brave chances. She made herself the antithesis of the alarming stereotypes favored by the enemies of her people and a departure from the zealous torque of her heroes’ radical politics.

She expressed herself within the strict neoclassical idiom, bending its rules to her needs. She rarely complained of racial abuse in America, but it was not easy. In Europe, she could express her anger more openly by pushing back at bigots in an equality of insult. Harsh words. Crude gestures. Defiant images carved in white marble soon to be displayed in major American cities.

Her boldness made her a target for scorn, lies, and denial. It so tried her early supporters that some dismissed her. It so tested later admirers that scholar Kirsten Pai Buick published over 200 pages discussing Lewis and the problem of art history’s black and Indian subject in 2010. In the twentieth century, attempts to downgrade her and to invade her privacy prevailed. Contemporary praise was buried by historians. Disclosure of a college scandal, confusion about her sexuality, and mysteries over her last days too often overshadowed her skill as an artist and her triumphs as an iconoclast.

The lack of an accurate biography added to chronic errors and confusion about her. It also made her a blank slate for writers with hasty ideas and narrow agendas. Not always doing justice to their intentions, they ignored the bulk of her work and sometimes led the reader astray with unchecked brainstorms, biases, and errors. As a result, even her most ardent fans of recent generations were likely to echo old slanders, slants, and typos as facts, interesting and reliably true.

With laurels for her work from Italian judges and from critics English and American, she personified the dignity and talent of colored women in 19th century America. As Bearden and my father saw her, she is a seminal figure in our cultural record. All artists must struggle for recognition, but she had to do more. She beat the color barrier when it was stoutest in terms of brute force, raw energy, and shamelessness. In modern terms, she outflanked the myths of inferiority with great gifts, superior skills, a studied strategy, and a stainless character. As the ‘Jackie Robinson’ of American art, she continued to inspire long after she went into voluntary exile and disappeared.

Museums and collectors now search for her work, pushing values tantalizingly higher. The last decade far outpaced the prices of the 1990s. Newark Museum purchased two marble busts, Hiawatha and Minnehaha, at $76,375 and $64,625, respectively, at a Christie’s auction in 2000. A Welsh family donated her bust of Longfellow to the British National Museums Liverpool in lieu of $117,000 in taxes. In April 2003, Sotheby’s London auctioned Night, an early version of her prize-winning Asleep, for £84,000 (about $130,000). Minnehaha brought $52,875 at Cowan’s Auctions, Cincinnati, Ohio, in February 2009. In other auctions, the tour-de-force veiled Bride of Spring, once thought to be lost, brought $138,000 at Cowan’s Auctions in 2007, a record at the time. A smaller and more sensuous veiled Spring took $27,255 at Skinner’s, Boston, in 2010. An early work, the three-figure Indians in Battle sold for $287,500 at Gabriel’s Auctions in Nov. 2010. Sotheby’s New York obtained $85,000, $87,750 and, in 2008, a record $301,000 for copies of the romantic Old Arrow Maker. The following year, a copy of its companion piece, the Marriage of Hiawatha, pushed the record to $314,500. Works that express the African-American struggle, such as the iconic Forever Free and Hagar, both in institutional hands for decades, can easily be described as priceless.

Many of her facts appear in the Bearden-Henderson History of African-American Artists – until now the most complete published authority on her life.[4] Its twenty-eight folio-size pages barely touch on her spirit, the dramas of tortured relationships, and the unique challenges she overcame as a pioneer. Because of her accomplishments and legacy, the authors felt her story deserved more study and a fuller telling for a wider audience. They started to draft sketches meant to sell the idea to a publisher who could reach the general reader. Then Bearden died in 1988.

Encouraged and occasionally aided by important scholars and others, my father pressed on. He spent substantial efforts to unearth little known details that helped him divine a more coherent reading of her life and art. He traced her steps, drafted more sketches, and collected material across North America and Europe. In 2003, he too passed away after a long illness, leaving a mountain of raw research and many ideas in various stages of draft or conversation.

Based on forty years studying the lives of African-American artists, he had fresh historical insights to Lewis’s life and work. Many sources he found challenged errors that hid truths both good and bad. He had exciting ideas about her complex personality and difficulties that nearly sank her career. He also recognized the socio-economic changes and the key role of a newly industrialized press that helped her to assault racism and sexism across the Western world.

Publication of Edmonia Lewis’s history was my father’s dying wish. As I had assisted him, meeting every Saturday for about fifteen years before his death, I shared his curiosity and his desire to memorialize her in print for the general reader. Unlike my father, who as a freelance never wrote without a publisher’s advance, I contributed to many learned journals without an invitation – my way of giving back to a community that had sustained my career in scholarly publishing. I decided to complete his work to satisfy my own curiosity. I hoped to help him tell Edmonia Lewis’s story – if I could – rather than see his devotion wasted. Relying on my memories of our conversations, going through his files and well beyond, I collated sources, marshaled facts, and fleshed out his arguments. Parts of his text and certainly his conception remain as I recall it. I enjoyed revolutionary advantages of full-text sources and databases online, enabling me to add many details previously beyond reach. Such advances led to discovering the surprising and long-sought details of the artist’s death.

In an effort to counter 150 years of errors, confusion, and meanness, I made a free web site filled with facts, links, quotations, and news of auctions and museum acquisitions: Edmonia Lewis: First Internationally Acclaimed African-American Sculptor, at www.edmonialewis.com. I am pleased to report the number of visitors has steadily risen each year. I encourage readers of this biography to check the site for copies of documents and other useful information as well as to register to receive notice of Edmonia Lewis News via email.

Many biographies of nineteenth-century women celebrate their subjects’ gender by using their first names throughout. Our goal reaches beyond femininity, a narrative style intended to flow like adult fiction and to reach a wide readership. Close attention to chronology, maps, and the role of the nineteenth-century press improved our understanding of social dynamics central to Edmonia’s struggle. Comments that fill gaps in documentation with markers such as imagine, perhaps, and the absence of quotation marks are simply musings framed as storytelling rather than as monographic analysis. If we have met our goals, the reader will perceive Edmonia’s innate character and gifts in the scattered glass of surviving sources. To serve academic interests, we provided more than eight hundred notes, a bibliography, and a reference list of more than one hundred of the artist’s works found in our sources.

The first book to interpret Edmonia’s work from outside the mainstream, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture, was published by its author, Freeman H. M. Murray, nearly one hundred years ago. My choice of self-publishing, in ebook format not dreamed of at the beginning of this project, echoes Murray’s approach as well as honoring our subject’s ideas of affordability, testing convention, and reaching out. I hope readers benefit from novel ebook features, such as hyperlinks, search, flexibility, and portability as well as its modest price.

The record shows Lewis as an artist driven by a spirit that was resolute, volatile, and uncanny. A difficult subject for any biographer, she appeared from and faded into the shadows of a society awed by her gifts and hobbled by cultish notions about blood, religion, class, sex, and art. Our Prologue sets out themes of ambition and resolve that struggle with social alienation and a need for privacy so great we should term it secrecy. Book One traces the bumpy road she traveled with strong-willed women of New England and her first great success as the New England anti-slavery commune and the Republican press trumpeted news of the first colored sculptor. Following her to Europe, Book Two reveals sudden fame, rude awakenings, harsh betrayals, miracles of fate, intense rivalries, unsung allies, a devotion to charity, confrontations polite and crude, and an outrageous Centennial climax. A two-part Epilogue discusses the image of the often-enigmatic artist and extends factual traces after 1878 and the hubbub of her American tours. Among the ways we found to illuminate her story and her art, we offer contrasts with some of her contemporaries – William Wetmore Story, John Rogers, J. Q. A. Ward, and numerous ardent feminists.

My father felt particular debts to Owen Laster, June Kelly, and Delbert Spurloc, to Michael Sayers for reading early drafts, to Joseph Henderson who found Lewis's medallion ad, to Elizabeth Henderson who made valuable corrections, and to Ted Henderson who helped with cover designs. I add my thanks for the counsel of the Bearden Foundation and the Bearden Estate and the invaluable aid and encouragement of F. Keith Bingham, Robert Cloud, Mitch Douglas, Eric Foner, George Gurney, Mary Sayre Haverstock, Amy Hill Hearth, Elizabeth Henderson, Joe Henderson, Ted Henderson, Theresa Leininger-Miller, Joe Lockard, Col. Merl M. Moore, Charmaine A. Nelson, Carroll Harris Simms, Eileen Tenney, Coni Porter Uzelac, Howard Zinn, and especially Harlene LeVine, who sustained me and my labors, and the spirit of my father, whose voice I will never forget.

For Harry Henderson, 1914-2003, and myself, Albert Henderson, Milford, CT., 2012

LIST OF CHAPTERS / CONTENTS

DEDICATION AND INTRODUCTION

LIST OF FIGURES

PROLOGUE

BEYOND PRAYERS

REDEMPTION

SANCTUARY

VENIAL SINS AND FAMILY SECRETS

SOJOURNING

FIRST COMMUNION

Book One - Boston

1. EAST IN 1863

2. EPIPHANY

3. MR. BRACKETT

4. EDMONIA’S BROTHER

5. STUDYING ART

6. THE WOMEN OF BOSTON

7. THE BLACK SUBJECTS OF JOHN ROGERS AND ANNE WHITNEY

8. A PRELUDE TO GLORY

9. A SUMMER DEATH

10. THE TREMONT TEMPLE INTERVIEW – 1864

11. MRS. CHILD

12. EDMONIA REVEALED

13. ANIMUS AND ANIMA

14. CRISIS 1864 TO 1865

15. THE MORNING OF LIBERTY

16. EXIT BOSTON

BOOK TWO – The World

1. STOPPING IN FLORENCE, 1865

2. ROME – 1866

3. CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN

4. STUDIO VISITORS

5. INDIAN THEMES

6. A NEW PATRON, AN OLD FEAR

7. MEET THE PRESS

8. HER FIRST EMANCIPATION STATUE

9. THE WATERSTONS

10. WILLIAM WETMORE STORY

11. A SECOND EMANCIPATION GROUP – 1866 TO 1867

12. GROWING SUCCESS

13. CUSHMAN AND THE OLD ARROW MAKER

14. THE GARDENS OF SALLUST

15. PARIS 1867 AND MORE

16. RENEWAL OF THE SPIRIT

17. ANNE WHITNEY’S DISDAIN – 1868

18. FOREVER FREE

19. HAGAR

20. TIMES DARK, OUTLOOK LONESOME – 1868 TO 1869

21. CELEBRITY LOST AND FOUND

22. BUTE

23. BACK IN THE USA

24. VINNIE REAM

BOOK TWO, Part Two – The Artist Becomes the Symbol

25. 1870 AND CHICAGO

26. STANDING OVATIONS – 1871 TO 1872

27. 1872 – WHY CLEOPATRA?

28. BUSINESS – 1872 TO 1873

29. MEDIA – 1873

30. TRAVEL CROSS-CONTINENT

31. NEW YORK RECEPTION – 1874

32. PRODUCING THE DEATH OF CLEOPATRA – 1872 TO 1875

33. PHILADELPHIA, 1876

34. THE DEPARTURE OF EDMONIA LEWIS – 1877 TO 1878

EPILOGUE – Post Scripts and Traces

1. ISHKOODAH’ AND EDMONIA

2. ROME AND LA DOLCE VITA

3. SPITE

4. AFTER 1878

5. THE GAMBLER, HIS HORSE, & THE FIREMAN

6. THE HAITIAN CONNECTION

APPENDIX: WORKS

KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES

NOTES - continued

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Urania, 1862

Figure 2. Benjamin Franklin, by Richard S. Greenough

Figure 3. Portrait of a Gentleman, 1871

Figure 4. Col. Robert Gould Shaw, 1864. Plaster

Figure 5. Robert Gould Shaw in uniform, May, 1863

Figure 6. Maria Weston Chapman, 1865

Figure 7. Maria Weston Chapman

Figure 8. Edmonia’s passport application, 1865

Figure 9. Hiawatha’s Marriage, modeled 1866

Figure 10. The Old Arrow Maker, modeled 1866, carved 1872.

Figure 11. Abolitionist symbol

Figure 12. Helen Ruthven Waterston, 1866

Figure 13. Sojourner Truth

Figure 14. The Libyan Sibyl, by William Wetmore Story

Figure 15. William Wetmore Story, ca. 1870

Figure 16. Via Margutta art district, including the Spanish Steps

Figure 17. Via di San Nicola da Tolentino art district

Figure 18. The Freedman, by J. Q. A. Ward, 1863

Figure 19. Dioclesian Lewis, 1868

Figure 20. Edmonia Lewis, sculptor, ca. 1867

Figure 21. Minnehaha, 1868

Figure 22. Hiawatha, 1868

Figure 23. Forever Free, 1867

Figure 24. Indians in Battle, 1868

Figure 25. The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Giambologna, 1582

Figure 26. Hagar, this copy 1875

Figure 27. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, marble

Figure 28. Longfellow, plaster

Figure 29. Hygeia, ca 1872

Figure 30. Vinnie Ream. Oil, by G. P. A. Healy, 1870

Figure 31. Advertisement, Chicago Tribune, 1870

Figure 32. Edmonia Lewis, by Henry Rocher, 1870

Figure 33. Asleep, 1872

Figure 34. Poor Cupid, carved 1876

Figure 35. Cleopatra, by William Wetmore Story, 1860, this copy carved 1865

Figure 36. Young Octavian, ca. 1873

Figure 37. James Peck Thomas, 1874

Figure 38. Portrait of a Woman with a rose in her hair, 1873

Figure 39. Abraham Lincoln, 1871

Figure 40. The Sleeping Faun, by Harriet Hosmer, 1865

Figure 41. Moses (after Michelangelo), 1875

Figure 42. The Death of Cleopatra, 1876

Figure 43. Advertisement, Chicago Tribune, 1878

Figure 44. John Brown. Plaster, painted terra cotta, 1876

Figure 45. Senator Charles Sumner. Plaster, painted terra cotta, 1876

Figure 46. Bishop Benjamin W. Arnett. Plaster, painted terra cotta, 1876

Figure 47. Autograph souvenir of Edmonia Lewis, front and back

Figure 48. The Veiled Bride of Spring, 1879

Figure 49. The Veiled Bride of Spring, detail

Figure 50. African-American clergyman, 1879

Figure 51. Official death record, London, 17th Sept., 1907.

Figure 52. Bust of a Woman with plaited hair, 1867

Figure 53. Landing of Columbus

Figure 54. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ca. 1873

Figure 55. Harry Henderson (left) and Romare Bearden

PROLOGUE

Never yet could I find that a black has uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. – Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1787.

Beyond Prayers

Think of Edmonia Lewis as an artist at war. As her heroes took to the gun, the pen, or the pulpit to attack the cruel social order of the 1800s, she weighed in with artistic gifts and tools meant for clay, plaster, and marble. In the grand struggle for respect, she was a regiment of one.

With every image she created, every appearance she made, and every interview she gave the press, she undermined the lies of white advantage in a cool counterpoint to the rage of Civil War and Reconstruction. Physically tiny and personally charming, she taunted the demons of bigotry as she carved her heritage and appeared with her work alongside the best artists of the day. The news media spread her message far beyond those who actually saw her or her work.

To her enemies, she confirmed the rise of inferiors and a threat to white manliness. She was a woman and colored[5] – of mixed blood, in fact, as her mother was an American Indian and her father was of African descent. Clearly, there was more at issue than race. As a world-renowned sculptor with a studio in Rome comparable to the best, she raided a male profession – only recently disturbed by well-to-do white women. Behind their backs, a cowardly opposition called female artists amateurs, plagiarists, and potentially immoral. And then there were other issues such as class, which separated her from artists who had no need to earn a living, and the religion that placed her again with minorities in England and America.

News of her rise sent white supremacists and their foes spinning in opposite directions. It also upset all who tied well-established Greek-revival sculpture to hallowed ideals, to enduring public monuments, and to the heroes of the literary canon. Esteemed sculptors were supposed to be divinely gifted, ivy-educated white men – the learned poets of stone and princes of the literati. An appreciation of their work demonstrated breeding, refinement, and elegance.

Born outside the precincts of polite society, Lewis was none of the above. She found international fame (and notoriety) with the help of a few wealthy Englishmen, radical idealists energized by the Civil War, and a press invigorated by live steam power and newly laid rails of steel. Believers in natural rights thanked God for her timely entrance as young men gave up their lives to defend one side against the other. Political movements seeking a variety of equalities added to her support.

Whether or not she envisioned her potential place in history, she surely chose task after strategic task to take her there. She established a studio in Rome, Italy, then returned to America year after year.[6] Each time she returned, she was sure to suffer the sting of intolerance. She knew what harm could come to her. She had endured insults and a near-mortal beating. Inspired by martyrs, she fearlessly risked all to blaze a path in the arts as the nation grappled with the sudden liberation of four million slaves. Her yearly tour was especially demanding because she brought heavy statues and fragile plaster casts. She always arrived in the heat of summer and traveled for months, dealing with public accommodations mined with mean surprises. Then she returned to Rome on the rough seas of winter.

Why did she choose such a grueling calendar while other artists summered in the Alps or the British Isles? Her public reply was sardonic: The summers in Italy are too much for me.[7] A more candid truth emerged as she vented anger in 1876: To do something for the race – something that will excite the admiration of the other races of the earth.[8] To this end, her two greatest passions – her art and her craving for equality – merged and set her course.

Redemption

Racial equality was the holy grail of Reconstruction. It extended the anti-slavery thrust that sparked and defined the American Civil War. Many Members of Congress crusaded to secure rights for freed slaves. As long as they could, they assaulted remnants of slavery with reforms[9] enforced by federal troops. They met a growing resistance among northern voters unwilling to give up their ideas of racial advantage. In the South, they faced profound denials and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan.

The struggle meant more to Edmonia than religious ideals and moral nobility. For a colored woman, the culture of bigotry threatened frightening, personal consequences. It underpinned massive denials of opportunity and civil rights as well as segregation, theft, mayhem, and shameless acts of public dishonor, rape, torture, and murder.

She was a stalwart with her own unique front of attack. Aided by pioneers and friends of the movement, she changed the world by carving statues in Rome and standing beside them in major American cities – race and gender for all to see. She iconized her heroes and idealized her heritage in expensive white stone and affordable plaster.

Her art was unusual and her strategy oblique. Placing herself in the path of crowds and critics, she let her work speak for the natural gifts of colored people. All she needed to do was show up with one or more of her statues. She shamed crude injustices with a quiet, gracious dignity while her legendary figures looked on. Then she did more with polite interviews, publicity, and charity.

As she boarded a steamship ten years after first sailing for Europe, the upcoming United States Centennial Exposition was in her sights. Large crowds, critics, and journalists from everywhere promised maximum exposure. Scheduled for the following year, it was her ultimate target – if she could just get there. She would have no second chance.

The Centennial banned colored people, even from its construction. Amazingly, she had obtained an invitation to exhibit, but she faced a desperately crushing debt. She needed no less than a miracle. Her political opportunity had nearly run out. As one admirer of hers put it:

The Sun of Emancipation which had risen in 1863, had seemingly reached its zenith in 1865 with the passage of the 13th amendment prohibiting slavery. But already it was being obscured by clouds. Already the sheriff’s hand-cuffs were taking the place of the former master’s chains; already the chain-gang stockade was supplanting the old slave pen. … The freedwoman was being told that it would be better for her children, even in the North, to go to separate schools; and that it would be better, for a while, anyway, for her people not to thrust themselves forward too much but to accept separation on pubic conveyances and in public places. She was being gravely assured that there was neither degradation nor detriment in all of this. Of course, she was being told with a cajoling smile, your people will be more ‘comfortable’ to have churches and a social circle all your own: public sentiment, you see, is not yet ripe enough – you know you’ve got to begin at the bottom: etc., etc.[10]

This trip was her last hope. The elections of 1874 had dealt a mortal blow to Reconstruction. Provoked by a year-long economic slump, northerners had rejected President Grant and his program. In the Deep South, brutal acts of terror erupted to keep former slaves down.

English ship masters did not recognize her profession. When she first returned to America in 1869, a Cunard official insisted on writing spinster by her name on the passenger list. A spinster was originally a working woman who ran a spinning wheel. The term soon generalized to mean a woman who worked to live, an old maid who lacked a good man. Once, she let such snubs pass. Now she sailed with the French. One day she would not care. In 1875, she was a celebrity and the employer of twenty men. She was tiny, only four feet tall according to her passport application (Figure 8).

Speaking slowly, she engaged the agent of the SS Ville de Paris. He probably sat at a small table, making him eye to eye with her. Her small size belied a powerful determination and the wisdom to choose her battles well. She stated her particulars: Miss Edmonia Lewis, 31, sculptor! Capable of standing her ground against burly teamsters, she could cite her commercial cargo, her news clips, and her gold medal – if need be. She watched him unblinkingly as he took her measure.

The Frenchman must have noticed her chic garb and steady gaze. Of sixty-three passengers, she was one of twenty traveling second cabin and not the only artist aboard. The liner was elite in that it offered no steerage, the low-price fare favored by poor emigrants. He easily complied. His cursive Sculptor appears by her name.[11] Unlike clerks of many English ships, he rarely wrote spinster, preferring none or a blank if a passenger declared no occupation.

She must have relished her small victory as she prepared to disembark. Sweet to the spirit, savory to the soul, each taste of equality could soothe a gnawing hunger. Maybe the New York press would notice her return to America and print her name again.

Sanctuary

Edmonia buried her troubles the way other women banish ex-lovers, never to speak of them again. Nor did she let any twinge of scandals at Oberlin or Boston give her pause as she sailed back to America. An innocent misstep in Boston had left her unable to boast about her first Emancipation works. Oberlin, Ohio, was far worse. It had become the gates of hell for her, an elaborate portal erected by idealists hooked on getting their own cheerless souls into heaven.

The only degree-granting institution to offer female and colored adults coeducation with white men was Oberlin College. Its founders conceived the College in the 1830s as part of a pure if not quite Puritan society. They promised a radical harbor of (nearly) equal education for women. Adding colored people to their formula was an unpopular but needed amendment. It served noble goals even as it drew enough new students to achieve financial security.

The town became a busy stop on the Underground Railroad and a magnet for free colored people who settled near the tracks on the south side of town.[12] Not content with its hazardous experiment in the social order, Oberlin called its school God’s college. It was led by the famous anti-slavery revivalist, Charles Grandison Finney, whose missionaries blazed with fiery protests aimed at ending slavery everywhere. Because other colleges shut out such radical doings, every avid anti-slavery student went to Oberlin. The year Edmonia arrived, its vigilantes tangled with fugitive slave hunters in what became famous as the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. Oberlin still brags it was the town that started the Civil War.

To some Ohio neighbors, Oberlin’s radical tilt was unwelcome. They sent their young men and women to the College for the sake of ease and economy. Yet, they squirmed at the nearness of many colored freemen, radical politics, and a militant theology. Their clerics cried heresy from their pulpits. Ohio’s founders (it joined the Union in 1803) had prized Caucasian purity as if skin color assured harmony. Some of their first laws set out to deter free coloreds from settling. They banned slavery (which was allowed in neighboring Virginia and Kentucky), in effect forbidding a population of colored slaves. Years before, Federal troops led by mad Anthony Wayne had pushed out the Indians.

Edmonia attended the College from 1859 to early 1863.[13] Here, she found her talent as an artist. Here, she became an adult. And here, as a biracial child raised by American Indians, she bonded with her African ancestors and their people in America. Here the story of her indomitable spirit emerged with some clarity.

Venial Sins and Family Secrets

Accounts of Edmonia’s earlier years swirl in a muddle of contradictions. She lived at a time when official records and editorial fact checking were rare. Her interviewers often misspelled names of people and places. She also could be wily and devious, as fellow sculptor Anne Whitney, who liked her and helped her around 1864, confided to her best friend.[14] Her record is muddied by her interviewers, the vagueness of childhood memory, and her own white lies. It leaves conflicting tales of when her mother died (when she was three or nine or twelve?), her education (sometimes attending one or more schools before Oberlin College), her birth (anywhere from 1840 to 1865), and so on. Notably, ships’ passenger lists demonstrate a fashion of age-fluidity shared by her lady friends.

Most of her family tree remains a mystery. It is clear from her brother’s accounts that he and his family once lived in Newark, NJ.[15] The 1840 census offers but one colored family named Lewis with both parents and young children. The head of the household, Samuel Lewis, was born between 1804 and 1816. He worked in agriculture, and lived with a wife and three children under the age of 10: two boys and a girl. The city directory called him a laborer and put him at 43 Bridge St., hard by the Passaic River. Neighborhoods tended to cluster, Germans with Germans, Irish with Irish, and so on. Our sources suggest that the Lewis family lived apart from other colored people.

A city directory reference to the widow Hannah Lewis, living at the same address as Samuel Lewis in 1835, stimulated more research, unfortunately, so far, only suggestive. According to the census, she claimed New Jersey birth between 1775 and 1783, making her at least a generation older than Samuel. Remarkably, she was illiterate but owned real estate. New Jersey was the last northern state to end slavery, passing a law in 1804 that aimed for a gradual riddance. Born decades before the law, she may have emerged from bondage with the unusual gratitude of a kind or blood-related master – or gained the property through hard work and good judgment. Hannah reappears in the 1861 city directory, but not thereafter, not even on any NJ death certificate. Edmonia and her Haitian-born brother left us no reference to Hannah or other relatives in Newark.[16]

The appearance of Hannah Lewis together with English names, Mary Edmonia and Samuel Lewis, suggests Samuel was not a Haitian native but a young adventurer – inspired by word of the slave revolution and conditions more hospitable to his race – who stole off to the forbidden black republic[17] and smuggled himself back to Newark when he had a family. Before the Civil War, a careless reference to the activist state, which had promoted revolts against slavery elsewhere, could have been fatal. Many Americans dreaded and reviled it because of hellish stories and fears of new rebellions. They feared any black man who spoke of Haiti.

After 1840, Samuel Lewis lost his wife and children, all but a son born in 1832, and met Edmonia’s mother. Edmonia’s 1865 passport application, our sole sworn reference to her birth date, laid claim to on or about July 4, 1844 (Figure 8). The Massachusetts census taken May 1, 1865, which gives her age as 20, agrees. Her (half-)brother put the death of his mother the same year.

Never mentioning Haiti or Newark, Edmonia described her father as a gentleman’s servant and a full blooded negro.[18] She called her mother a full blooded Chippewa, and a wild Indian, … born in Albany, of copper colour, and with straight, black hair. Straight black hair and artistic talent were features she shared with her mother, a woman who crafted beaded souvenirs and sold them to tourists. Asked (at a celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation) from which parent she inherited most, she coyly replied, I don’t know. My mother used to say to my father, ‘your people have submitted to be slaves; mine never did.’ I like my mother’s people for that.

She had little experience with her father or his people as a child. She had probably heard such comparisons time and again. Having died around 1847, according to her brother, their father lies in an undiscovered grave. So does her mother, who we estimate died two years later.

Edmonia honored her mother’s deathbed appeal to stay with the tribe three more years. In making the request, her mother followed a local custom. Unlike Europeans, this tribe honored women as its progenitors – matriarchs with the powers of property, legacy, and descent. Mothers lived with daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters. Women always married outside their clan and usually brought their mates back to the family fire. Exotic examples of women’s suffrage to Europeans, clan mothers had a vital place in tribal decisions. The local culture also prized steely integrity and curbs on emotional expression.

Staying with this tribe until the age of eight must have left lasting impressions. The Jesuit maxim seems appropriate here: Give me the child for seven years, and I will give you the man (or, in this case, the woman).

In 1852, her twenty-year-old brother prepared to go west to seek his fortune. He boarded his eight-year-old sister with Captain S. R. Mills, and he paid her tuition at a day school (or dame school, where children were tutored in a private home) for four years. She described her first encounter with school as taking place in Albany after learning prayers from black-robes among the Indians. From 1856 to 1858, she went to New York Central College, a near-bankrupt Baptist prep school at McGraw, New York,[19] and then to Oberlin College. School records confirm Mary E. Lewis at both. Both were supported by a common network of donors. Both were staunchly egalitarian and ardent members of the anti-slavery movement.

Many details of the accounts given by Edmonia and her brother evade confirmation. We could not find her, her brother, their parents, or Capt. S. R. Mills in the 1850, 1851, or 1855 censuses, or in any likely city directory or Catholic parish record. She said she lived and roamed with the tribe as they sold souvenirs, mentioning Canada and a variety of cities in upstate New York with repeated references to Albany. She said her brother was at a school for Indian boys at the time of his mother’s death, before he went to California.[20] (She was unaware or hid that they did not share a mother.) As she found fame, she preferred to claim herself as wild rather than as an exemplar of good conduct and proficient in arithmetic, Latin, French, grammar, and composition. Notably, she downplayed her high grades at McGraw, saying, They could do nothing with me.[21]

Her brother gave details that serve to fill out her tales, but he omitted many references that would match hers: Albany, Greenbush, Canada, Indians, etc. It is likely he found the association with Indians – which drove her career – would not be helpful to his. He wrote only that he traveled from 1847 to the spring of 1852, working as a barber. Perhaps he roamed with the tribe, entertaining, shaving, and cutting hair as they peddled their crafts at local fairs. In his later years, he entertained at public events, singing and playing a banjo, harp, or guitar. Their tales begin to mesh only after 1852.

Sorting through published sources, archived letters, records, etc., led us to question many published claims, including some of our own. The wrong birth year of 1845, traceable to the American Cyclopedia (1883), can be corrected. Inferences drawn from Canadian records pointed to a colored grandfather named Lewis living with the Mississauga Chippewa in Ontario, Canada.[22] A later comparison with the 1851 Canadian census dispatched that notion as baseless.

More interestingly, we came to believe her brother hid his Haitian birth all his life as he did his teen years with the Indians.[23] Their father was too young to have experienced the bloody war – but not too young to have absorbed its militant message of equality without exception, passed it to his son, and cautioned him appropriately.

As an adult, Edmonia had her own secrets. One was her brother’s name. Her interviews and letters by her friends refer to him only as her brother or as Sunrise (his Indian name). Aside from his obituary, discovered in 1990 and quoted here, we found no descriptions or photos of him and no witness accounts of his visits with her in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc. He lived as a frontier businessman and died an esteemed citizen of Bozeman, Montana. After his death, the mayor eulogized him as very much of a white man … white in his entire make up – physically, socially, intellectually, morally. Edmonia denied having white blood, but the mayor’s remarks suggest a white lie in her attempts to impress her blood-obsessed fans – or the mayor’s use of the word white as a metaphor of praise.

A secret of her young adulthood was her Roman Catholic childhood religion. Earnest Protestants, who controlled the communities where she lived from 1856 to 1865, rejected the Catholic Church. She claimed her mother was Chippewa, but the nearest Chippewa, who lived in Canada near Niagara Falls, were avid Wesleyan Methodists. Only long after she fully settled in Rome did she make clear she was not raised as a Protestant. In 1879, the New York Times reported, her creed and blood did not harmonize with the precision and method of Oberlin. The black robes from whom she had learned prayers with the tribe in Canada, used the Indian term popularized by Longfellow for French Jesuit missionaries.[24] As an adult in Italy, she took the baptismal name Maria Ignatia[25] – another Jesuit connection. St. Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus. That she did not receive the sacrament as a child tells us her parents were not practicing Catholics.

The repeated Jesuit references point to the Mohawks living 250 miles north of Albany, on the Québec frontier with New York State. In the 1800s, they were the only Catholic tribe in the region still served by Jesuits.[26] They also had a remarkable tradition of adopting outsiders to fill their ranks – some captured, some refugees or wanderers – allowing for a displaced Chippewa woman and her family to settle in their midst and join local trade and customs. Notably, around 1864, Edmonia said her Indian name was Suhkuhegarequa,[27] a Chippewa word that literally means fire-making-woman. We take this as a poetic bow to her fitting in with local ways in her pre-teen years. The Mohawks still call themselves People of the Flint, flint symbolizing the key to making fire. Other tribes speaking Algonquin languages (which include Chippewa) called Mohawks the fire-making people.

French Jesuits set up many North American missions in the seventeenth century. Recalled and replaced as the French withdrew from Canada after 1763, a few remained to serve Mohawk fur traders in the St. Lawrence Valley. By the time of Edmonia’s childhood, they had well-established mission churches for the St. Regis Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, including Kahnawake (Caughnawaga), Québec, about 60 miles south of Montréal. After the War of Independence, the U. S. / Canadian frontier bisected the tribal area, giving the Mohawks free passage but creating a fertile field for administrative conflicts. In Canada, tension between the official Church of England and the Roman Catholic Jesuits afflicted the quality of education. South of the frontier, New York State built and furnished