Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  For studies of John Quincy Adams and race, slavery, and abolition, see William Jerry MacLean, “Othello Scorned: The Racial Thought of John Quincy Adams,” Journal of the Early Republic 4 (Summer 1984), pp. 143–60, and David Waldstreicher, ed., A Companion to John Adams and John Quincy Adams (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), especially: David Waldstreicher, “John Quincy Adams: The Life, the Diary, and the Biographers,” pp. 241–62, and Matthew Mason, “John Quincy Adams and the Tangled Politics of Slavery,” pp. 402–21, for Adams as a “sleeping giant.” An invaluable resource is David Waldstreicher and Matthew Mason, John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery: Selections from the Diary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). See too William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Knopf, 1996). Several biographies of Adams have been useful: Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life (New York: Knopf, 1997); Phyllis Lee Levin, The Remarkable Education of John Quincy Adams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); James Traub, John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 2016); and especially, for the Shakespeare connections, Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary (New York: HarperCollins, 2014). For laws governing interracial marriage in Massachusetts, see Amber D. Moulton, The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

  On the N-word: William Faux, Memorable Days in America (London, 1823), p. 9, and Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1833), p. 219. Also useful are Randall Kennedy, Nigger (New York: Random House, 2002), and John M. Lovejoy, “Racism in Antebellum Vermont” (https://vermonthistory.org/journal/69/vt69_s05.pdf), which provides additional examples of New Englanders using the N-word in the 1830s.

  The standard version of the dinner encounter between Kemble and Adams can be found in Diary of Charles Francis Adams, eds. Marc Friedlaender and L. H. Butterfield, vol. 5, January 1833–October 1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. ix, 84–87. See too Thomas A. Bogar, American Presidents Attend the Theatre: The Playgoing Experiences of Each Chief Executive (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2006). For Fanny Kemble’s American journal, see Frances Anne Butler [Kemble], Journal, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1835). For the publication history and hostile responses, see Clifford Ashby, “Fanny Kemble’s ‘Vulgar’ Journal,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 98 (January, 1974), pp. 58–66. The North American Review, run by Alexander Everett, who had been at the original dinner party, said that it was “singularly deficient” in “maturity of judgment.” The London Times was skeptical that she had even written it herself, and the Athenaeum called it “one of the most deplorable exhibitions of vulgar thinking.” See too the excellent Catherine Clinton, ed., Fanny Kemble’s Journals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), and Catherine Clinton, Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). For Kemble’s experience on the plantation, see her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (London, 1863), and for the best scholarly edition, see Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, ed. John A. Scott (New York: Knopf, 1961; rpt. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984). For a history of the Butler plantation, see Malcolm Bell Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987). For Kemble on playing Desdemona, see Frances Anne Kemble, Records of Later Life, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1882), vol. 3, p. 368.

  For Abigail Adams on Othello, see Charles W. Akers, Abigail Adams: An American Woman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 99–100; and Bogar, American Presidents Attend the Theatre, pp. 22–23. For a transcript of Abigail Adams’s response to seeing Othello, and for the letter to her son of September 24, 1785, see Founding Families: Digital Editions of the Papers of the Winthrops and the Adamses, ed. C. James Taylor (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2016). For John Adams on Shakespeare, see his letter to his son John Quincy Adams, January 20, 1805 (reprinted in my anthology Shakespeare in America), as well as his diary entry for January 30, 1768.

  For more on Othello and race in nineteenth-century America, see Tilden G. Edelstein, “Othello in America: The Drama of Racial Intermarriage,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, eds. James M. McPherson and J. Morgan Kousser (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), rpt. in Werner Sollors, Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Heather S. Nathans, Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For James Hammond on Othello, see James Henry Hammond, Remarks of Mr. Hammond, of South Carolina, on the Question of Receiving Petitions for the Abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia (Washington City: Duff Green, 1836), p. 13.

  For Louisa Adams, see Diary and Autobiographical Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams, eds. Judith S. Graham, Beth Luey, Margaret A. Hogan, C. James Taylor, vol. 2, 1819–1849 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). For her remark about Iago, see p. 693. Louisa Thomas, Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams (New York: Penguin, 2016) is a helpful biography. And for an insightful account of the Adams’s marriage, see Gordon S. Wood, “The Strangely Contentious Lives of the Quincy Adamses,” New York Review of Books, December 8, 2016, pp. 55–56.

  For studies of amalgamation in antebellum America, see Kyle G. Volk, Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 104–16; Celia R. Daileader, Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Tavia Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); James Kinney, Amalgamation!: Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Werner Sollers, ed., Interracialism; and Herbert Aptheker, Anti-Racism in U.S. History: The First Two Hundred Years (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992). On the threatening sexuality of black men, see Martha Hodes, “The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and Black Men in the South After the Civil War,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1993), pp. 402–417.

  CHAPTER 2: 1845

  For the young Ulysses S. Grant I have drawn on: John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 1, 1837–1861 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967); Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); Roland C. White, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant (New York: Random House, 2016); and Ron Chernow, Grant (New York: Penguin Press, 2017). For Grant’s reputed girlishness, see William E. Woodward, Meet General Grant (New York: H. Liveright, 1928), and “Longstreet’s Reminiscences,” New York Times, July 24, 1885; for Elderkin, see Chernow, p. 42, and White, American Ulysses, p. 676 (which cites Emma Dent Casey’s typescript, “When Grant Went A-Courtin’”).

  I have found the following works on the Mexican-American War most helpful: K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican War 1846–1848 (New York: Macmillan, 1974); Paul W. Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the Mexican-American War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Frederick Merk, Slavery and the Annexation of Texas (New York: Knopf, 1972); Richard Bruce Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997); Felice Flanery Lewis, Trailing Clouds of Glory: Zachary Taylor’s Mexican War Campaign and His Emerging Civil War Leaders (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010); and Martin Dugard, The Training Ground: Grant, Lee, Sher
man, and Davis in the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (New York: Little, Brown, 2008). On the gendering of that war, see Peter Guardino, “Gender, Soldiering, and Citizenship in the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848,” American Historical Review 119 (2014), pp. 23–46; Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America, revised ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), pp. 52–53; Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); and National Songs, Ballads, and Other Patriotic Poetry Chiefly Relating to the War of 1846, compiled by William M’Carty (Philadelphia: William M’Carty, 1846), pp. 45–46. For Slidell’s words, see Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Knopf, 2012), p. 86. For Grant on the legacy of this campaign, see his Memoirs, vol. 1, chapter 4. And for Porter’s fate, see Lewis, Trailing Clouds of Glory, p. 62; Lewis notes that before his death, Porter had served as a go-between for Grant and his fiancée (helping to keep their engagement secret, in much the same way that Michael Cassio had for Othello and Desdemona).

  On the rich body of work on Manifest Destiny, I am especially indebted to: John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (July–August 1845), pp. 5–10; Robert D. Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan and His Times (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003); Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris, eds., Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997); Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of the Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); William Earl Weeks, Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996); Lyon Rathbun, “The Debate over Annexing Texas and the Emergence of Manifest Destiny,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 4 (Fall 2001), pp. 459–94; Steven E. Woodworth, Manifest Destinies: America’s Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2010); Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny; James M. McCaffrey, Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (New York: New York University Press, 1992); and especially Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and her A Wicked War; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); Albert Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansion in American History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1935); Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (New York: Knopf, 1963); Joseph Wheelan, Invading Mexico: America’s Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2007); Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision: 1846 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943); Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); William Earl Weeks, Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996); Steven E. Woodworth, Manifest Destinies: America’s Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2010); and Richard Bruce Winders, Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle over Texas (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2002). For Winthrop’s quotation from Shakespeare’s King John, I am indebted to Greenberg’s Manifest Manhood; see Robert Charles Winthrop, A Memoir of Robert C. Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897), pp. 39–40. See too Greenberg, who cites this.

  For the army camp in Corpus Christi in 1845–1846, see Daniel Harvey Hill, “The Army in Texas,” Southern Quarterly Review 9 (April 1846), pp. 434–57; Darwin Payne, “Camp Life in the Army of Occupation,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 73 (July 1969–April 1970), pp. 326–42. For the fighting and carousing in the camp, see Edward S. Wallace, General William Jenkins Worth: Monterey’s Forgotten Hero (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1953), p. 66; and Fifty Years in Camp and Field, Diary of Major-General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, ed. W. A. Croffut (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), p. 203.

  For the theatricals at Corpus Christi: Longstreet’s unpublished interview can be found in the Hamlin Garland papers, Collection no. 0200, Special Collections, USC Libraries, University of Southern California, where he also remembered the men, including Grant, who performed in John Baldwin Buckstone’s light farce, The Irish Lion; a contemporary acting edition calls for its female characters to appear in bonnets and white muslin dresses; James Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1896); Jeffrey D. Wert, General James Longstreet: The Confederacy’s Most Controversial Soldier—A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). See too William Seaton Henry, Campaign Sketches of the War with Mexico (New York: Harper, 1847); George Gordon Meade, The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913); Thomas M. Settles, John Bankhead Magruder: A Military Reappraisal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), p. 40; The Daily Picayune, January 20, 1846, p. 2; and the Corpus Christi Gazette, January 8, 1846. For Othello in the antebellum South, see Charles B. Lower, “Othello as Black on Southern Stages,” in Philip C. Kolin, ed., Shakespeare in the South: Essays on Performance (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1983); and on Knowles’s The Wife, see The Spectator (April 27, 1833), p. 18. On the dating of rehearsals of Othello: on January 2, 1846, Grant wrote to Julia that he has just returned from “a tour of one month through Texas,” so he could not have rehearsed the part in December—and Mrs. Hart had arrived and was acting with the company by early January (The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 1, 1837–1861). Apparently, Mr. Hart (likely married to Mrs. Hart) and his fellow professional actors who performed in the Union Theater followed the troops on the campaign, and enlisted volunteers to flesh out the performances; see J. Jacob Oswandel in his Notes of the Mexican War 1846-47-48 (Philadelphia: n.p., 1885).

  On Romeo and Juliet in the nineteenth century, see James N. Loehlin, ed., Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Anne Russell, “Gender, Passion, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century Women Romeos,” Essays in Theatre 11 (1993), pp. 153–67; Jill L. Levenson, Romeo and Juliet (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); Joseph N. Ireland, Records of the New York Stage, from 1750 to 1860, 2 vols. (New York: T. H. Morrell, 1867); and George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 1. See too William Winter, Shakespeare on the Stage, 2nd series (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1915), p. 201.

  On Charlotte Cushman’s life and theatrical career, see Cushman Papers, in the Library of Congress, including the scrapbook she kept of reviews of her London debut as Romeo; Clara Clement, Charlotte Cushman (Boston: Osgood and Co., 1882); Emma Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman: Her Letters and Memories of Her Life (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1878); Lawrence Barrett, Charlotte Cushman (New York: The Dunlap Society, 1889), which includes an appendix on the roles she played; Joseph Leach, Bright Particular Star: The Life & Times of Charlotte Cushman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); Lisa Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Susan S. Cole, “Charlotte Saunders Cushman,” Notable Women in the American Theatre: A Biographical Dictionary, eds. Alice M. Robinson, Vera Mowry Roberts, and Milly S. Barranger (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989); and for Cushman’s diary, see Charlotte Cushman, “Diary” 1844–45, Dramatic Museum Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. For her success in breeches parts, see the letter of W. E. Burton quoted in Leach, p. 130: and for her other roles, see the appendix to Barrett’s Charlotte Cushman. For Grant going to see Cushman perform, see Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman papers, 1823–1941, Bound Correspondence, 1824–1876, box 6, no. 1751.

  On the reception of Cushman’s Romeo, see Elizabeth M
. Puknat, “Romeo Was a Lady: Charlotte Cushman’s London Triumph,” Theatre Annual 51 (1951), pp. 59–69; George Fletcher, Studies of Shakespeare (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847), pp. 378–82; Yvonne Shafer, “Women in Male Roles: Charlotte Cushman and Others,” in Women in American Theatre, eds. Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins, 3rd ed. (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006), pp. 65–72; Anne Russell, “Gender, Passion, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century Women Romeos,” Essays in Theatre 11 (1993), pp. 153–67, and her “Tragedy, Gender, Performance: Women as Tragic Heroes on the Nineteenth-Century Stage,” Comparative Drama 30 (Summer 1996), pp. 135–57; Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); and Denise A. Walen, “‘Such a Romeo as We Had Never Ventured to Hope For’: Charlotte Cushman,” in Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History, eds. Robert A. Schanke and Kim Marra (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).

  For contemporary commentary on and reviews of her Romeo from which I quote, see William Winter, Other Days: Being Chronicles and Memories of the Stage (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1908); “Theaters and Music,” John Bull, January 3, 1846; the Times (London), December 15, 1845; the Athenaeum, January 4, 1846; Morning Chronicle, December 30, 1845; English Gentleman, January 3, 1846; on her mind becoming masculine, London Observer, March 2, 1845; New York Evening Post, May 14, 1850; Spirit of the Times, July 4, 1846, and June 12, 1858; and “Amusements,” New York Times, November 16, 1860. For Queen Victoria’s response, see George Rowell, Queen Victoria Goes to the Theatre (London: P. Elek, 1978), p. 74; on there being no trick to her Romeo, see “Sheridan Knowles’ Criticism of Miss Cushman’s Romeo,” rpt. in the Baltimore Sun, June 27, 1846; John Coleman, Fifty Years of an Actor’s Life, 2 vols. (New York: James Pott and Co., 1904); for how she prepared for the part, see especially George Vandenhoff, Leaves from an Actor’s Note-book (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1860), pp. 217–18; George William Bell’s essay, cited in Walen, p. 47; on her relationships with Forrest and Macready, see, in addition to the modern biographies, Karl Kippola’s excellent Acts of Manhood: The Performance of Masculinity on the American Stage, 1828–1865 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Vandenhoff. I am also indebted to Richard Foulkes’s fine Dictionary of National Biography entry on Macready. And for the poem likening Cushman to Macready, see Dutton Cook, Hours with the Players (London: Chatto and Windus, 1881); the poem was written for Almanack of the Month). On the crowds that came to see her at the end of her career, see the New York Herald, October 15, 1850.