If in 1820 emancipation still seemed distant (and few in the country at that time shared his prescience), a decade later, civil strife over the issue of slavery seemed far more likely. Nat Turner’s short-lived and bloody slave rebellion (and the ensuing and frenzied retaliation) took place in August 1831 and slavery laws in the South quickly became more restrictive. In the North, the number of antislavery societies ballooned from 1832, when the first was founded, to 1836, when the number reached 350. In December 1831 Adams inaugurated his congressional career by introducing abolitionist petitions, but did so with the caveat that he did not “countenance and support” those calling for the abolition of slavery; he was simply defending the constitutional right to petition. When challenged by a zealous abolitionist to explain this seeming contradiction, Adams explained that pressing further “would lead to ill-will, to heart-burnings, to mutual hatred, where the first of wants was harmony; and without accomplishing anything else.” Adams was still a reluctant abolitionist, struggling to find middle ground, hoping to preserve the union of North and South while insisting on the principle that slavery violated a higher natural law. As a recent biographer puts it, “Adams remained something of a sleeping giant between this brief foray [of 1833] and his awakening to his antislavery role in January 1836.” Adams’s resolve strengthened considerably in 1836, which was also the year that his essay on “The Character of Desdemona” was published. That year he ingeniously opened up a new front on the war on slavery, invoking a “war powers” argument and threatening martial law. Shortly after, Adams finally admitted to himself in a journal entry that opposing slavery “is a cause upon which I am entering at the last stage of life, and with the certainty that I cannot advance it far; my career must close, leaving the cause at the threshold. To open the way for others is all I can do. The cause is good and great.”
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IF WE RELY on his daily journal entries and his vast correspondence as evidence, Adams had not given much thought to Desdemona’s “unnatural” union with Othello for nearly a half century after his undergraduate speech on the subject, a period in which he went on to serve as a diplomat, ambassador, secretary of state, senator, and then president of the United States. It was only after leaving the White House in 1829, when he began to wrestle with how committed he intended to be to the abolitionist cause, that their interracial marriage once again began to preoccupy him. The first inkling of this occurs in May 1830, in a letter he wrote to his son Charles. He had been reading the fragments of Cicero’s oration on “Roscius the Comedian,” he explained, which addressed a property issue concerning a slave—trained as an actor by Roscius but owned by another Roman—who is killed. Who ought to collect damages, his owner or the man who taught him his craft?
Adams, trained as a lawyer, considered this question’s potential contemporary application, for such a property dispute might well arise in the American South between a slave owner and a tradesman who had taught a slave his craft. The case prompted another thought. While slaves may not be taught to read in America, they might profitably be taught to act in leading black roles: “The managers of our theatres might take the hint; and except where it is felony to teach them to read, might teach many a slave to make excellent Othellos, Zangas, and Jubas—In my exposition of Othello’s character he ought to have no other representative.” Adams wrote with the assurance that his son knew who Zanga, the avenging black hero of Edward Young’s The Revenge (1721), was, as well as Juba, the Numidian prince of Joseph Addison’s Cato (1712). His antislavery polemic touching on the failure to educate slaves might have ended there, but Adams could not stop himself, and added: “As the people of Maryland and Virginia breed slaves for exportation to the cotton and sugar plantations, why should they not breed them for stage players and husbands to Desdemonas?” Adams couldn’t seem to invoke Othello without his thoughts drifting to that “unnatural” scene in which a trained black actor would marry a white Desdemona.
He was not alone in fantasizing luridly about Othello and Desdemona. E. W. Clay invited viewers to do the same in another of his racist prints from the late 1830s, called “The Fruits of Amalgamation.” Hanging on the wall above the interracial couple and their children is a portrait of “Desdemona and Othello.” It may look like a quiet domestic scene, but the threat of the violence that a black man may inflict upon his white wife—imagined to be the inevitable fruits of such a union—is foreshadowed in the scene from Shakespeare’s play, and even subliminally figured in the angle of the black husband’s arm (the same as Othello’s, who is about to smother Desdemona).
Adams and Clay weren’t the only ones invoking Othello during these heady times. Adams’s fierce opponent in the House, James Henry Hammond, of South Carolina, who believed that slavery was “the greatest of all the great blessings which Providence has bestowed upon our glorious region,” invited his fellow congressmen to imagine a nightmarish future in which an Othello would be seated alongside them. The real threat for Hammond was political, not sexual: a talented and ambitious black man cut in Othello’s mold dominating whites politically, even one day serving as president of the United States. Like Adams, Hammond found it easier to speak of Shakespeare’s fictional character than to name an actual, threatening African American person:
Are we prepared to see them mingling in our legislation? Is any portion of this country prepared to see them enter these halls and take their seats by our sides, in perfect equality with the white representatives of an Anglo-Saxon race—to see them fill that chair—to see them placed at the heads of your Departments; or to see perhaps some Othello . . . gifted with genius and inspired by ambition, grasp the Presidential wreath and wield the destinies of this great Republic? From such a picture I turn with irrepressible disgust.
The 1830s proved a difficult time for those, like Adams, trying to stake out an increasingly untenable position of favoring abolition while opposing amalgamation. The incoherence of this position was mirrored in legislative battles: while in 1836 Massachusetts legislators revised state law to include “explicit instructions that the biracial offspring of interracial couples were deemed illegitimate,” they reversed themselves seven years later, voting to repeal the ban on marriage between whites and “Negroes, Indians, or Mulattos.” There could be no middle ground. It was either unnatural and illegal or natural and permissible. Those like Adams trying to split the difference were left arguing that people were free—but that freedom did not extend to the right to marry someone of a different race.
Adams couldn’t stop obsessing now about Othello and Desdemona, and began rehearsing to those in his circle, in letters as well as in conversation, his riff about the play’s interracial problem. So, in September 1829, when dining with his son Charles, Adams “disclosed his singular views” of Othello and Macbeth, which, Charles recorded, “rather amuse than convince me.” And in February 1831, he wrote to Pennsylvania author and politician Charles Jared Ingersoll about Desdemona as a “wanton trollop” who received her just punishment for “falling in love with a blackamoor.” Later that year, while dining in New York City with the legal scholar James Kent, Adams tried out his theory once again: “I said I took little interest in the character of Desdemona, whose sensual passions I thought over-ardent, so as to reconcile her to a passion for a black man.” Kent chose not to let the argument pass unchallenged, for Adams admits in his journal that Kent “did not entirely agree with him in this estimate of Desdemona; his son still less.” Adams may have been rigid but he was not stupid—and if his congressional record is any indication, he knew the difference between a winning and a losing argument. He must have recognized that he wasn’t gaining any converts to his views on Desdemona’s lust for Othello, yet he persisted, and by the time that he encountered Fanny Kemble eighteen months later, he was pressing this argument more aggressively than ever.
What he told her, and then so uncharacteristically elaborated on in print, seems to have allowed Adams
to cling to a position short of genuine freedom and equality for former slaves. His tentative steps toward becoming a committed abolitionist seem to have required a counterweight, and he found it in this repudiation of amalgamation. Shakespeare gave him much to work with. By directing his hostility at Desdemona rather than Othello, he was able to sidestep criticizing black men. And it proved more convenient to attack a headstrong young fictional woman than a living one, though it’s clear he could be hostile to both. It is not a great leap to consider his essay on “The Character of Desdemona” as a rebuke of Fanny Kemble, who had publicly embarrassed him. While her name was excised before Adams’s response was published, she haunts it. As with race, so with gender: Shakespeare licensed Adams to say what he otherwise was too inhibited or careful to say—or say so honestly. For a very intelligent man, he seems to have been extraordinarily clueless about how he sounded—or about how much he was revealing about his most deeply held convictions. He never admitted to or wrestled with in the privacy of his journals how disgusting he found interracial marriage or how at odds this disgust was with his abolitionist convictions; yet he felt free to share these feelings with friends, with Fanny Kemble, and eventually with the world, but only through his reflections on Shakespeare.
Adams remained proud of what he had written about Desdemona’s character, so much so that when in 1839 a leading American actor, James Hackett, who was assembling a collection on Shakespeare, asked if he could republish the pair of essays, Adams agreed, and recorded that this “extension of my fame is more tickling to my vanity than it was to be elected President of the United States. I pray God to forgive me for it, and to preserve me from falling in my last days into the dotage of self-adulation.” Hackett included both essays in his Notes, Criticisms, and Correspondence upon Shakespeare’s Plays and Actors, published in 1863, a copy of which he sent to President Abraham Lincoln. What Lincoln thought of his predecessor’s essays is lost to us.
Adams died in 1848, so didn’t live to see this belated publication, nor another that also came out in 1863: Fanny Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. Had he seen her book he might have been infuriated by what she now revealed of their conversation, yet perhaps mollified by a letter appended to the end of the book, written by Kemble in late 1862 in response to being asked whether she considered herself an abolitionist. From what she had seen, Kemble wrote, hypocritical and self-interested Northerners, “with the exception of an inconsiderable minority of its inhabitants,” have “never been at all desirous of the emancipation of the slaves.” Their position on abolition only changed with “the gradual encroachment of the Southern politicians upon the liberties of the North,” which provoked “resistance on the part of Northern statesmen.” In the same volume in which she had earlier castigated Adams for having called Othello a “nigger,” she singled out for special praise the efforts of one of those progressive Northerners: “the life-long opposition to Southern pretensions by John Quincy Adams.”
Ulysses S. Grant (left) and Alexander Hays, at Camp Salubrity, Louisiana, 1845.
CHAPTER 2
1845: Manifest Destiny
In the summer of 1845 more than half of the US Army was ordered to head to the Mexican border. The soldiers set up camp on disputed territory south of the Nueces River, in Corpus Christi. Four thousand strong, it was the largest deployment of American troops since the War of 1812. Yet the objectives of their mission remained unclear, even to its commanders. Had this “Army of Occupation” been dispatched to the border as a threat, to nudge Mexico into surrendering its claims to Texas—formally annexed by the United States the previous March—in exchange for a substantial cash payment? Or had President James K. Polk sent them there to provoke Mexican troops and trigger a war of conquest that could lead to a land grab of more than a million square miles and extend the reach of slavery?
Weeks then months dragged by as the troops, encamped in neat rows along the shoreline, drilled and awaited orders. Before they landed, only a few dozen people lived in the small coastal trading post; but the arrival of thousands of soldiers in Corpus Christi quickly drew a parallel army of camp followers—a “vast horde of liquor-selling harpies.” The outcome was predictable. One of the officers described Corpus Christi at the time as “the most murderous, thieving, gambling, cut-throat, God forsaken hole in Texas.” Soldiers combated boredom, dysentery, rattlesnakes, and torrential downpours with gambling and brawling, and patronized the saloons and brothels that had sprung up near their encampment.
In early November, hoping to curb the fistfights and dissipation, Captain John B. Magruder oversaw the building of an “Army Theater” within the encampment, large enough to hold eight hundred spectators. He and other young officers, many of whom had been classmates at the US Military Academy at West Point, fell to work, painting scenery and rehearsing plays that they themselves would perform. The theater took two months to build. It opened on January 8, 1846, and played to packed houses, though admission was not cheap: a box seat cost a dollar and a place in the pit half that (at a time when soldiers were paid seven dollars a month). The opening production was James Sheridan Knowles’s The Wife, a decade-old play about a wife’s suspected infidelity that owes much to Othello. For soldiers anxious about wives and sweethearts left behind, a plot that in the end celebrated a devoted wife’s fidelity was a smart choice. But an alternative and brutal outcome, in which male anxieties find an outlet in violence, is never far from thought. The play’s epilogue, spoken by its heroine, Mariana (the “wife” of the title), makes this, and its relationship to Shakespeare’s grim model, explicit; in it, Mariana recounts how she had “dreamed each night, I should be Desdemona’d,” though luckily she avoids the fate of Shakespeare’s heroine, since, as she puts it, “my Othello, to his vows more zealous— / Twenty Iagos could not make him jealous!”
The officers also decided to stage Othello—and most likely began rehearsing it in November. One might think that a play about a black man eloping with a white woman would have been objectionable or taboo in the South, but the opposite is true: in the quarter century before the Civil War, Othello was regularly staged in slave states (with bronzed-up white Othellos); twenty times, for example, in Memphis, Tennessee, and twice that many times in Mobile, Alabama. The issues of race and amalgamation had a particular resonance for those gathered in Corpus Christi, because victory in a war with Mexico meant introducing slavery into territory where it was now illegal and raising the prospect of the large-scale intermingling of white Anglo-Saxon blood with what was called the Mexican “race.”
Far more than most playgoers, they would also have recognized that Othello was also about the frustrations of military life, in which soldiers seek relief in drinking, fighting, and the embrace of camp followers. Iago’s grievances at the outset of the play would also have sounded familiar, given the often-bitter conflicts among the officers gathered in Corpus Christi over who had precedence: those with brevets (temporary promotions based on merit) or those who held seniority in rank the old-fashioned way (as Iago puts it “where each second / Stood heir to the first”). And, of course, it was a play about manliness and the fear of cuckoldry.
A popular lieutenant, Theodoric Porter, was chosen to play Othello. But finding the right officer to play Desdemona proved a tougher challenge. Lieutenant James Longstreet—one of many at Corpus Christi who would later play a leading role in the Civil War—was first asked to play her, but he stood six feet tall and was unusually athletic, a football player, and was deemed physically wrong for the part. The company then settled on a West Point classmate and friend of both Porter’s and Longstreet’s who was five feet, seven inches tall and a slight 135 pounds. His name was Ulysses S. Grant. We don’t know whether Grant had much interest in or exposure to Shakespeare, but at this point in his life he seems to have had a strong intellectual bent: he was a skilled painter and an avid reader of contemporary fiction, and we know that on his way to West Point
from his home in rural Ohio he had taken advantage of going to the theater while passing through Philadelphia.
It’s hard to shake the familiar grizzled image of Grant, whose steely visage stares back from the front of fifty-dollar bills. But that image dates from decades later in his life, after he had served as commander of the Union army that defeated the Confederacy, and then as eighteenth president of the United States. Grant was chosen to play Desdemona because of his looks and perhaps his voice too (J. D. Elderkin, who served with him in this campaign and admired Grant, recalled that “he was always a very mild-spoken man, he spoke like a lady almost”). Occasionally, biographers draw attention to what was considered his “girlish” features as a young man, none more so than W. E. Woodward, whose popular Meet General Grant (1928) pressed this point hard: “Young Grant had a girl’s primness of manner and modesty of conduct. There was a broad streak of the feminine in his personality. He was almost half-woman, but the strand was buried in the depths of his soul.” Woodward offers no source for his claim, repeated by others, that in “the army before the Mexican War he was called the ‘Little Beauty’ by the officers of his regiment.”
All this would seem exaggerated were it not supported by what Longstreet recalled of their days at the Academy when interviewed by the New York Times at the time of Grant’s death in 1885: “As I was of large and robust physique I was at the head of most larks and games. But in these young Grant never joined because of his delicate frame.” Longstreet also recalled Grant’s “fragile form” and how his “distinguishing trait as a cadet was a girlish modesty.” A rare photograph of a youthful and beardless Grant survives from the year before he shipped off to Corpus Christi. Age 22 or so, Grant is on the left, alongside his racing horse, Dandy, and might easily pass for one of Shakespeare’s cross-dressed heroines. When she first set eyes on him at this time, Emma Dent, his future sister-in-law, thought Grant looked “as pretty as a doll.” It’s not that surprising, then, to learn that Longstreet, in an unpublished interview he gave around 1890, remembered how “Grant took part in the theatricals which we had at Corpus Christi and used to do the girl’s parts. He looked very like a girl dressed up.”
Shakespeare in a Divided America Page 5
