The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis

by Harry Henderson

  Edmonia had been away from the United States for over two years by this time. She was on her own turf, and she made the most of it.

  She glared at the loud one and scratched out the name. She told the visitors, she would not have any name in her book that is a disgrace to anyone!

  Putting down the pen, she gnarled her hand into il mano cornuto (hand with horns). In Italy this was a rude gesture. With forefinger and pinky extended like horns, it is popular today at rock concerts. She jabbed it at them, as she cursed and chased them out.

  Anne, a witness to the rebuke, thrilled with delight and commented how funny she was.

  Marketing Strategies

  Adding to her successful Longfellow line, Edmonia turned out images titled Hiawatha, Minnehaha, (Figure 21 and 22) and Minnehaha’s Father. Their faces lack exotic features, but fans of the day considered their hair and clothing true to her Native American past.

  Figure 21. Minnehaha, 1868

  Figure 22. Hiawatha, 1868

  The marble busts shown above belong to the Newark Museum, Newark NJ. Photos by Uyvsdi.

  Where other artists sold only marble, she sold plaster busts portraying her ancestors and heroes, as she did in Boston, and marble miniatures (for example the bust of Miss Waterston). This lifelong policy served hero worshippers excluded by art forms that favored wealth. She sold them by mail as well as at shows and in her studio.

  Quick to cast, plaster was affordable. Her plaster portraits appear dressed (Figures 6, 28, 44, 45, 46), suggesting a sound grasp of purse-related taste. Most of her marble busts are classically nude.

  18. FOREVER FREE

  The New Emancipation Statue

  About the same time that Edmonia joined the Catholic Church, Elizabeth Peabody arrived in Rome as Charlotte Cushman’s guest.[320] She and Charlotte undoubtedly reveled in the recent YMCA triumph. Beshawled and breathless from climbing Rome’s hills, she stopped at Edmonia’s studio where she pored over the guest book and cards left by visitors. Americans, she noted with dismay, left the fewest traces.

  Edmonia told her that German neighbors were always sympathetic and helpful.[321] Later that year, Prince George of Prussia would order a statue of Clio, the Greek muse of history.[322]

  No one, of course, outranked Charlotte Cushman in Edmonia’s gratitude. She planned a fine portrait to be sold in plaster as well as in marble.[323]

  Miss Peabody, a vigorous partner in the struggle against slavery, found the new emancipation statue particularly exciting and timely. Edmonia told her she had dedicated it to William Garrison and asked that it be paid for only by colored Americans. Miss Peabody later cooed, “[that] clothed it with so much sacredness that it made a cold critical analysis impossible. It went to my heart, as it came from hers.”[324]

  More than a year earlier, Edmonia had sent a photo of it to fans in America, hoping to rally support. Ednah Dow Cheney renewed her sense of promise, predicting, “if [Edmonia] keeps her simple nature amid the temptations of classic art, [she] may have a deep word for us.”[325]

  Mrs. Child was apparently eager to restore the bond torn by her attack on The Freed Woman. On Jan. 31, 1867, the New York Independent published her reaction to the new design, the first published description of it and an opinion laced with rosy optimism.

  Even negroes, whom we have so long kept shut up in the dark cave of ignorance, are coming to a perception of the beautiful. At no other period of the world could Edmonia Lewis, half Indian and half African, have thought of becoming a sculptor, and been so generously encouraged in her thought. She has recently sent from Rome the photograph of a statue in commemoration of Emancipation. It represents a stalwart freedman, with shackles broken, raising one arm in thankfulness to heaven, and resting the other protectingly on the shoulder of his kneeling wife. The design is well conceived, and the manner of treating it does her so much credit that her patrons have reason to feel greatly encouraged concerning her ultimate success in the art she has chosen.[326]

  Is it any wonder that Edmonia’s confidence grew? Made bold by such words of praise and moved by a bearish hunger for recognition, she borrowed money for marble in Rome.[327]

  The costs of good marble were steep or she might have gone for a much larger slab, one requiring the ladders and scaffolds used by Hatty and others. She settled on making the new statue more than forty-one inches high. (She stood barely seven inches taller herself.) Larger than The Freed Woman was,[328] its relative size suggests a growing confidence.

  Before finishing, she discarded the original title, “Morning of Liberty,” and chiseled a more memorable phrase. “Forever Free” is a quotation from and the essence of the Emancipation Proclamation.

  After finishing its polish, she carefully crated and shipped it to Boston. She was certain her New England fans would rejoice to share her vision in marble. It landed just as Miss Peabody arrived in Rome

  Figure 23. Forever Free, 1867

  Edmonia made her second “freed woman” in the context of family – i.e., under the protection of a man. Photo courtesy: Howard University, Washington DC.

  More Comments and Criticism

  Rare in its ability to reach out and sustain relevance, the image never required an elite education, a teacher, or a book to be an icon of the African-American struggle. It speaks of hope and the bittersweet taste of new freedoms. The day is won, but not the struggle. Chains are broken but not gone. Equality, justice, and true brotherhood are still beyond reach. Liberty is only a step toward the American dream.

  Both figures yearn for the infinite ideal. Their upward gazes seek a common blessing. The modestly dressed woman oozes piety and trust. The pose of the nearly nude man shouts joy, strength, and the heroic resistance of militant abolitionists like Rev. Henry Highland Garnet. Natural and dynamic, the man challenges the status quo as he stands up to hierarchy, decorum, and tradition.

  The man’s silhouette presaged the black power salute of the 1960s: a symbol of defiant solidarity. A hostile closed fist, of course, would not have been acceptable to Edmonia or her fans. Her affirmative soul and indirect tactics endeared her to the white buyers who supported her studio while infuriating the enemies of equality.

  Her art espoused a thoughtful, righteous, persuasive approach, not angry threats. The war she waged, in modern terms, was “psychological.” No matter her warrior heroes, her line of attack was more akin to the militant civility of Frederick Douglass, Oberlin College, and Garrison’s Liberator than to John Brown’s armed rebellion.

  For an artist lacking a master tutor, Edmonia’s command of the medium, the style, and human anatomy is quite special. Forever Free hews to neoclassical technique and structure if not its detail, reference and reserve. The carefully balanced composition forms a triangle from the man’s raised hand to the base. Each figure assumes an irregular stance. The polished marble looks less like stone than like flesh, metal, and cloth.

  For a neoclassical-period sculpture, the immediacy, exuberance and anatomical details of Forever Free trampled custom as much as its direct reference to American field hands did. It stands in sharp contrast to the passive Greek Slave, the proud Zenobia in Chains, and even to the thoughtful Freedman. An American abolitionist who visited Edmonia’s studio in 1868 noted “her desire to catch the more spirited effects of a first impression, rather than to embody in the clay the harder likeness that comes to one as the features grow more tame by familiarity.”[329] Tuckerman’s writer also pointed out and praised her resistance to neoclassicism.

  Later academics would seek to validate Forever Free as “neoclassical” by finding a Greek inspiration.[330] They then puzzled over her departures from antique ideals of anatomy.

  Likely heartened by Ward’s entries in Paris, Ball’s Lincoln bozzetto, Hatty’s elaborate Temple of Fame model[331] – and her fans – Edmonia stressed her break with the classics by turning to America. She gave the man (but not the woman) sub-Saharan features and both figures large, strong, working class hands. The choices let African-Amer
ican viewers recognize themselves, even in white marble. Crossing the color line was beyond the style – but beginning to be accepted in other American artists.

  As the 1860s public expected an idealized – or non-realistic – symbolism, the racial incongruity passed without note for decades. Observers’ comments at the time ignored obvious details and took the woman in the group to be colored. Like the lost Freed Woman, her kneeling pose is more a symbol of Civil-War era politics than an homage to ancient Greek art. An 1866 marble by Edmonia marked Preghiera [“prayer” in Italian][332] is nearly identical to the woman in Forever Free. In its separate context, it appears to convey a European theme.

  Later generations became used to racial accuracy in the sculptures of Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (born 1877), Augusta Savage (born 1892), Richmond Barthé (born 1901), and others. Eventually, they questioned the look of Forever Free. Freeman Murray’s 1916 study (the first) of Emancipation sculpture called the woman’s treatment “toning.” “As to physical features,” he noted, “Miss Lewis, in common with others who preceded her and others who followed her, seemed to feel called upon to ‘favor’ the woman in the group.”[333] He also quoted Meta Fuller, who took no issue: “The man accepts it (freedom) as a glorious victory, while the woman looks upon it as a precious gift.”

  To suffragettes and modern feminists, the woman can speak for all women of the period – subject to male dominance and praying for their own rights.[334] By the time Edmonia shipped the statue to Boston, it was clear no woman would share equality with colored men. Many thundered with rage. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (seemingly unaware of Edmonia’s northern roots) saw it as a cue to claim suffrage for “the black women of the South” in her new political magazine, the Revolution.

  Whereas the lost Freed Woman had no man, the new statue seems to reflect the Victorian family, conservative, safe, and dependable.[335] Child and Peabody referred to the woman as “wife.”[336] (There are other symbolic possibilities. Rather than the usual inference of husband and wife, the racial mismatch could have echoed Edmonia’s well-known biracial parentage, father and daughter, or the idealized fraternity of brother and sister as suggested by art historian Hugh Honour.[337] No comments recorded during Edmonia’s lifetime hint at any of these ideas.)

  More than likely, making the woman with white features was a practical concern for market preference – a lesson learned from the failure of The Freed Woman. The Freedmen’s Record seems to bear out this thought with a polite ambiguity. Calling the female “a young girl,” it remarked, “The design shows decided improvement in modelling the human figure, though the type is less original and characteristic [emphasis added] than in the ‘Freedwoman,’ which she sketched in the Spring.”[338]

  Elizabeth Peabody, who ardently backed Edmonia’s art, found a more poignant message: “The noble figure of the man, his very muscles seeming to swell with gratitude; the expression of the right now to protect, with which he throws his arm around his kneeling wife; the ‘Praise de Lord’ hovering on their lips; the broken chain, – all so instinct with life, telling in the very poetry of stone the story of the last ten years.”[339]

  That was the reaction Edmonia must have counted upon when she impulsively decided to ship her second Emancipation tribute to Boston.

  Boston Burns

  New England disappointed Edmonia again. Who would have thought the abolitionists who sent her to Rome as a VIP would so roundly reject her Emancipation studies? Was this not their dream? Did they not tell her so?

  She later confessed, “When I came to Rome, I thought I knew everything, but I found I had everything to learn.”[340] Apparently referring to her art, the comment also seems to reflect the high cost of wisdom.

  Mrs. Child and her friends could not have been more offended than if Edmonia had war-painted her face and danced buck-naked on the Boston Common. Nattering how ignorant and crude she was, they smarted at past associations with her.

  Particularly chafed was the sixty-eight year-old Samuel E. Sewall, a Boston lawyer. He and his wife, Harriet, were dedicated abolitionists, contributors to the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, and good friends of Maria Child. It was Samuel who received the mean surprise of cargo freight-collect in the short days of winter.[341] Topping the rude arrival were Edmonia’s bills totaling $800.

  To keep the authorities from charging storage, then to auction the statue away, he had to rush to Boston harbor, pay $200, and then hire someone to haul it off the docks – but where? He had no interest in taking the unexpected artwork home. What should he do?

  The well-established Alfred A. Childs & Co. gallery on Tremont Street, which had shown Edmonia’s Dio Lewis bust and Whitney’s Africa Awakening, agreed to take it on consignment and put it on display. The Boston Universalist magazine, Ladies’ Repository, quickly offered praise: “a beautiful and suggestive statuette … representing a colored man with his hands raised exultingly on account of his emancipation, and a colored woman kneeling near, her hands clasped in devout thanksgiving.”[342]

  Why Edmonia chose to address her shipment to Mr. Sewall we may never know. He probably led her on with charming words, soon forgotten by him, treasured by her. From Rome, she wrote to follow up and waited in vain for his reply.

  She also sent photos of herself in work dress, a reminder of her solemn calling, to New England friends such as Anne Whitney’s sister and Adeline Howard, the aspiring teacher who had gone with her to Richmond.[343]

  Weeks later, she appealed directly to Mrs. Chapman, saying she had not heard from Mr. Sewall or any of her friends.[344] She desperately begged for help. She needed to pay bills.

  The “Sincere Letter”

  After hearing of the Sewalls’ dismay, Child smoldered with embarrassment for months. Surely adding to her discomfort, her peculiar cycle of public joy repeated itself in print – for all to see – as she made private apologies for being Edmonia’s promoter.

  Remember, in 1866 Child had snuffed the Freed Woman only days after, in spite of, and regretting her sentimental approval in the Independent. Now, in its April 1868 issue, the Prang’s Chromo reprint of her admiration in “Illustrations of Human Progress” amplified the arrival of Forever Free with freakish timing. Written more than a year earlier, it could have only aggravated her sense of guilt.

  About the same time, the National Anti-Slavery Standard published her “Plea for the Indian,” then reprinted it in pamphlet form. In it, Child reveled as Edmonia told how smartly she had defied stern authority:

  Speaking of Edmonia reminds me of an impromptu witticism of hers. Some years ago, an old Calvinistic minister exhorted her to attend revival meetings, and frequently took occasion to reprove her love of frolic. Seeing her running and romping with some of the other girls before breakfast, he exclaimed, “Ah, you child of Satan!” “Good morning, father,” she exclaimed.[345]

  Child was helpless to erase the blessings she had sent to the printers. The two reminders could only have salted wounds from Edmonia’s repeated affront to her ban on carving marble without an order.

  Years later, rechewing the record for the benefit of Sarah Shaw, she recalled her first reaction to Forever Free, “She wanted me to write it up;” then told a bold fib (or dwelled in deep denial): “I could not do it conscientiously, for it seemed to me a poor thing.”[346]

  The sharp proof of Edmonia’s perseverance remained on display in downtown Boston. Private comments and press notices[347] must have added to Child’s angst. The June issue of Susan B. Anthony’s Revolution magazine may have been the last straw.

  Child honed her sharpest pen and wrote a “sincere letter” to Edmonia, blasting her poor judgment. Then she let friends like Harriet Sewall know how fiercely she had scolded. Her letter to Edmonia is lost, but she described writing it:

  Somebody must check her thoughtless course. She literally takes no thought about money, and because she has been very generously aided, she draws upon friends of her race as if their sympathy was an inexhaustible bank entirely
at her disposal. All this is very excusable in one so inexperienced and so entirely unacquainted with the customs of society. But for her own sake, it won’t do for her to go on so.”[348]

  Child bristled with sarcasm, adding, “if marble and freight are obtained by whistling ‘to raise the wind,’ she will probably send over a marble Pocahontas to be presented to the Chief of the Chippeways, the tribe to which her mother belonged.

  Plainly tortured, Child soon wrote again in needy catharsis to say she would rather have given $50 than write her “sincere letter.”[349] She claimed a noble forgiveness as she anguished, “[Edmonia] has no calculation about money; what is received with facility is expended with facility. How could it be otherwise when her youth was spent with poor negroes and Indians?”

  She went on to explain how Edmonia’s wild background somehow excused her offence yet provided ample reason to shut her down. “People who live in ‘a jumpety-scratch way’ (as a slave described his ‘poor white’ neighbors) cannot possibly acquire the habits of income and outgo. If she found all her bills for freight and marble paid, without expostulation from any quarter, she would soon send over another statue, in the same way.”

  Knives and Tomahawks

  Edmonia’s situation also deteriorated in Rome, where she was sinking in debt. Bouyed by a bubble of praise from fans and wealthy buyers, she had entered the two Hiawatha groups and Minnehaha’s Father for sale at New York City’s crowded 1868 National Academy of Design show held in May.[350] Minnehaha also appeared there, owned by an unnamed collector and not for sale. Creditors in Rome seeking the reassurance of a lien would find these assets beyond legal reach – but not before she borrowed again.