The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis

by Harry Henderson

  Having caved to women, the Fair stood its ground against colored applicants wanting to show their work – with racist intent almost as mean as the Centennial. Commission members wrote to Washington to head off appeals by Frederick Douglass and others.

  Too late, Douglass and other leaders[769] attacked deliberate exclusions. Many local colored people, embarrassed by the controversy, shunned the event entirely. They joked that Aunt Jemima, its most-remembered colored image, was a “slave in a box.”[770]

  Twenty thousand copies of a pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, published well after the fair’s opening, had little impact outside the African-American community. A passage titled “The Art of Sculpture” by educator I. Garland Penn featured Edmonia:

  Miss Edmonia Lewis, a young, ignorant girl, saw the statue of Benjamin Franklin on a first visit to Boston and exclaimed, “I can make a stone man!” Wm. Lloyd Garrison introduced her to a leading Boston sculptor, who gave her some clay and the model of a human foot, which she copied. From this beginning, Miss Lewis has now a studio of her own in Rome. Here she has executed work which has brought her the patronage of noted men and women. Her best works are busts of Charles Sumner, and Abraham Lincoln, “Hiawatha’s Wooing,” “Forever Free,” “Hagar in the Wilderness,” and the “Madonna.”[771]

  Notably, the summary skipped The Death of Cleopatra, which should have been well known to Chicago society, the art crowd, and beyond. Perhaps Penn felt uncomfortable with the saloon appearance. More interesting, he returned the immortal Forever Free from purgatory.

  New York, which counted Edmonia as a native, was the only state to recruit a colored woman to its board of expo managers. Imogen Howard, a well-known educator, was the daughter of Edmonia’s Boston landlord. She borrowed a copy of Hiawatha to display in the library of the Woman’s Building.[772] A month before the fair opened, news items also promised the companion bust, Minnehaha.[773]

  Edmonia made no effort at publicity or to appear with her work. Beyond the few notes cited here, we found no news about her.

  That her most ambitious work lacked a fitting home or another expo display must have broken her heart. Nearly twenty years after the Centennial, young American museums still showed no interest.

  A few years later, Republicans in Chicago automatically brought up Edmonia’s name when a group started to raise money for a monument to John Brown.[774] By 1900, plans for a bronze portrayal with sword in one hand, a nude colored infant in the other (the latter recalling his march to the gallows), pondered a nice location in either Washington or Jackson Park.[775] They mentioned Edmonia, however, no more.

  Atlanta, 1895

  In the countdown to the International and Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, publicity promised Edmonia’s Charles Sumner bust would be on loan from William Henry Johnson of Albany NY.[776] Johnson, a newspaper man, knew how to produce publicity. He loved Sumner as a leading advocate of Negro rights. To white southerners, Sumner was the devil.

  For a moment it was almost as if Edmonia were back, visiting editors and escorting her work. The momentum of the Union victory was long gone, and she probably would not have stood for the indignities of Jim Crow in Atlanta. Like southern railroads, neighborhoods, shops, and schools, the fair isolated colored entries in a “Negro Building.”

  The Christian Recorder at first supported the fair. It then objected to the separation of races, “Will there be colored cotton and white cotton?”[777] With a growing sense of outrage, it attacked the “monstrous inequity” as it described offensive accommodations: “We say let the colored people contribute their room rather than their company and make the occasion conspicuous for their absence”[778]

  Before opening day, AME Church Bishop Henry McNeal Turner urged colored readers of the Atlanta Constitution to turn the event to their own interest: “[It] allows me an opportunity to show to the world that I can be clean, mannerly, cultured and refined and deserve better tradement [terms of trade or treatment], and it is the surest way to get it.”[779]

  Turner had to overcome his hatred of Jim Crow to laud the new chance for people stalled in the South. The Great Migration northward would not begin for more than a decade. Colored support would also make the region appear benign to the outside world of investment and commerce and, he hoped, offer jobs.

  Having lost the advantages of slave labor, the South sought to recapture some of its glory on the backs of former slaves who were not organized to demand high wages and decent conditions. After Jim Crowing, lynching, and terrorizing for thirty years, Southern industry now needed their help to put on a show of good will and racial harmony.

  For those who wished to remain in the South, it seemed like a rare opportunity. At the September opening, educator Booker T. Washington called for colored people to become America’s industrial workers: to give up their demands for civil rights, to refrain from joining labor unions or seeking professional careers. By promising colored labor to industry, he seemed to embrace low status, states’ rights, and the Black codes[780] in order to achieve wide employment.

  A month later, at the opening of the Negro Building, the main speaker called for “the negroes of the south and the people of the south [to] be left to settle their own problems in their own way and in their own country.”[781]

  The Atlanta press ignored the segregated artists. For a detailed review of their show, one must search far beyond the old Confederacy. The Broad Ax, published for five hundred readers living around Salt Lake City UT, proudly described the building and its exhibits: “a characteristic Dahomey village … representing the lowest savage life of darkest Africa … proves a wonderful contrast with the surrounding evidence of culture and refinement of the American negroes.”[782]

  It praised Edmonia’s Sumner as well as photos by Daniel Freeman, a painting by W. P. Renn, and sculptures by self-taught William C. Hill.

  Already famous in France and America, Henry Ossawa Tanner gained a Diploma of General Excellence or Bronze Medals.[783] He once lived in Atlanta, but there was no hint of his person now. The Hampton Institute showed his Bagpipe Lesson and two other oils in its own area, apart from the main art display.

  The Utah paper also toed the party line in its summary: “One remarkable feature of this display of negro talent is, that nearly all of it comes from the Southern States, where the politicians of the North have always claimed the colored people were so oppressed and despised, that no substantial improvement could be made by the race. The work of this noble race refutes the falsehood and proves to the world that the negro is prosperous and happy in his old Southern home.”

  In Boston, some missed the adrenal rush of dissent. The Evening Record griped about Edmonia’s failure to appear. “Edmonia Lewis,” it charged, “who now lies in Italy … has forgotten all about her African extraction. The negroes point to [her bust of Sumner] proudly and say that ‘anyway, it was made when she was a negro.’”[784]

  Deaths in America – 1895 to 1897

  In spring 1895, Edmonia should have heard of the death of Frederick Douglass. A true ally, a pillar of support, was gone. He was a great champion of equality.

  A year later, her brother died after a brief illness. His obituary acclaimed “the colored barber” as one of the most outstanding men in Bozeman.[785]

  Reading the news clipping would have reassured her of his happy life. He built a fine two-story brick home with a stained glass window in 1881 and expanded it in 1883. That year he married Melissa Bruce, a colored widow from Missouri who had been renting the house from him.

  She gave him a son around 1886, adding to five children by her late husband. The boy played the guitar in family recitals while he played the harp.

  The article revealed her brother’s birth in Haiti, his light complexion, how stainless his character was, how he constantly read and studied, how successful he was in real estate and in building attractive homes. It recalled his pride in his sister, her career, and her triumph
at the Centennial. His funeral attracted hundreds of mourners. Two ministers officiated. The mayor delivered the eulogy.

  Edmonia once told Anne Whitney her brother was the only person in the world who cared for her success. She must have regretted missing his final days and his funeral. She likely went to church to pray, to light a candle. Perhaps she asked a priest what could be done for his soul, since he was not a Roman Catholic. She must have read and reread the obituary. It observed he left his family with a comfortable home and an estate estimated at $25,000.

  Then came another letter saying he had left her $10,000 in a San Francisco savings and loan society.[786] She went to the U. S. consul in Paris, Samuel E. Morss.

  A journalist since the age of 19, Morss had founded the Democratic-leaning Indianapolis Sentinel and, for his political support, was appointed Consul General in 1893 by President Cleveland. He could have known the Indianapolis pastor who received her Grant in 1878.

  Nearly two years later, Melissa Lewis sent $8,142.75 to Morss, who forwarded the balance to Edmonia. The sum (about $220,000 in 2010 buying power) left Edmonia with new possibilities. She also could have sold a business churning out plaster souvenirs, as John Rogers had done, for a large sum, for continuing royalties, or some combination. Whether she created more sculpture is not clear.

  In the interim, John Mercer Langston, who had defended her innocence at Oberlin, also died. After the Civil War, he moved to Washington DC and established Howard University law school. He became U.S. Minister to Haiti and San Domingo, then president of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute and a Member of Congress. His memoir, published 1894, recalled his victory in her case but discreetly did not mention her name.

  Brooklyn, New York – 1898

  Hope sent Edmonia racing back to America in 1898. An international art association had formed in Chicago. It might give The Death of Cleopatra a home. Apparently, she had not heard (or did not believe) the stories that her masterpiece decorated a saloon.

  She headed for Rome in the heat of summer while tourists in Rome fled north. She stopped at the stylish Hotel Allemagne[787] across the Piazza di Spagna from her destination, the U. S. consulate.

  She visited the consulate twice, on August 3 and 9, giving her address as “care U. S. Consul Gen’l, Paris.” Perhaps she sought fresh travel papers, letters of introduction, travel information, etc.

  In our view, she had not visited America for almost twenty years. Murray’s Handbook (1899) counseled generally in favor of passports, “as evidence of identity and respectability.” An American passport was not essential under U.S. law, but her color would draw challenges not experienced by other travelers.

  She then dashed to Liverpool, a trip now only two days, where she booked passage on one of Cunard’s fastest, the three-masted, two-funnel Umbria.[788] She was beyond being insulted by Cunard’s use of the word “spinster.”

  Arriving in mid-September, she stayed for a few days at the Herkimer Street home of blind Rev. William F. Johnson and his wife, Mary Augusta. Twelve years earlier, Edmonia had made his portrait bust. In the 1870s, people in Maine had confused her with Johnson’s wife who was born Mary Augusta Lewis.[789]

  The weekly New York Age reported the International Art Association in Chicago had purchased The Death of Cleopatra![790]

  Tracking down the story, Edmonia found nothing but talk. Some leading Chicago artists and teachers had organized. They hoped to popularize art appreciation. Two years later, they launched a short-lived magazine with an art deco cover called Progress: For the Promotion of the Fine Arts.[791] They had no interest in owning any work.

  During her visit, she must have heard how the Supreme Court ruled again for Jim Crow, confirming states’ rights to separate public facilities for white and colored.[792] America was no place for her.

  Searching for Edmonia Lewis - Mystery and Mystique

  Edmonia’s successes earned her a place among the modern heroes of culture and society. As an artist collected and cited by new generations, she made her way into lists of inspiration and the reference books of history and biography. Her name became a symbol for hopeful minorities, feminists, and believers in equal opportunity.

  An 1889 essay in the Christian Recorder took for granted that readers would instantly recognize her work on display.[793] Poet Eva Carter Buckner paired her in rhyme with “Toussaint L'Ouverture,” declaring, “And the great Edmonia Lewis, / Sculptress, whose work will endure.…”[794] People named their daughters Edmonia, not aware she was first called Ishkoodah’ or Suhkuhegarequa and Mary.[795]

  An article titled “She’s the Only One of her Kind,” a digest of old news in Hearst’s New York Journal, was quickly reprinted by the Chicago Tribune (Jan. 9, 1897) before a number of weeklies picked it up across the country. Lacking fresh contact with the artist, it recycled references to Pope Pius IX and a list of famous patrons published in the Boston Daily Traveller (“An Unplaced Artist,” Nov. 17, 1880) as if it were yesterday.

  While her name took on its own life, she faded away like the old soldier she was.

  The echoes of her fame fascinated, then frustrated her fans. They sought details of her last days and grave. Some made pilgrimages to Rome, tracing her steps and probing archives, cemeteries, city bureaus, and other potential sources. In a vacuum of facts, myths abounded, fielding a variety of sightings as well as rumored burials in Washington DC and California.

  Confusing the search, trusted editors had fallen to a blind faith that, absent real news, nothing had changed. Desperate to send stirring messages, but too lazy, too loose, and too poor to verify details, they kept her alive and well in Rome. They prayed to make do with old clippings: one article in 1902, two in 1907, a fourth in 1909, a reprint in 1911, testimony in Congress in 1906, and a book published in 1913.[796]

  The most cited of these, a 300-word “who’s who” entry in the Rosary magazine (1909) celebrated her as a Catholic. It cooed, “we are glad to say that although she may have advanced in years, she is still with us.”[797] Seeking to identify new details in this text, we found only data published nearly thirty years before. Like the widely reprinted “She’s the Only One of Her Kind” (1897), the Rosary followed and enlarged upon old news. It used the 1840 birth date found only in “An Unplaced Artist” (1880), mentioned the papal blessing, and brazenly copied passages such as, “she found the atmosphere [of Oberlin] somewhat uncongenial, but she studied there for two or three years, and there her Indian name of Wildfire was changed to Edmonia Lewis.” While inflating her devotion as “fervent,” the Rosary failed to mention her many religious donations. In 1911, the American Catholic Who’s Who reprinted it.

  Alas, the trail was cold. In 1901, “Anxious Subscriber” asked readers of the Colored American magazine for news about her. Although the editor reinforced the question and a second query soon appeared in the Literary World in London, nothing came of it. The following year, the magazine included an article that devoted considerable space to her. It started, “At Rome this talented woman is visited by strangers from all nations …”[798] The phrase is outdated, plainly from Brown’s Rising Son (1874), which, in turn, owed much of its text to Bullard’s interview in the Revolution (1871).

  In 1922, a scholar complained to his fellows, “What Negro of the United States knows the story of the last years of Edmonia Lewis, the sculptress, one of the truly great products of the race?”[799] In 1970, another called the failure of biographers to follow Edmonia’s later years “tragic.”[800]

  By 1900, the raging beast of bigotry in America had deployed vaudeville, caricature, “coon” songs, and advertising to make the myth of black failings a bastion of American popular culture. As described by W. E. B. Du Bois, society forced black folk to live behind a veil that hid them from mainstream America. He went on to discuss how it felt “to be a problem.”[801]

  Edmonia surely knew. She had her own solution: exile. Fate had relieved her of her mission. Europeans ignored her color or sympathized with the “burden of two
despised races,” which she always bore with more pride than protest.[802] She announced to the press as early as 1873 she would never again live in America. Jealous American rivals had nothing good to say about her. Aging fans had few resources to seek her out.

  That she naturally dropped out of sight should not surprise. Her father had vanished, then her mother. Then it was her turn. She sighed farewell to her fans in 1878 and sailed away like Longfellow’s hero. Pleased to find her in Rome years later, Douglass noted that she had so adapted to Italian life that she rarely spoke English. But not forever.

  London

  The British census of 1901 found her living in central London, around the corner from the fabled riches of the British Museum and within a mile of the National Portrait Gallery.[803] It marked her age as 59 (She was about 57.). Notations of “artist (modeller)” and “working at home” suggest she continued to sculpt – most likely the religious themes and portraits at which she excelled. Off Tottenham Court Road in central London, the address was occupied in 2011 by Rokeby Art Gallery, Absolutely Fab Disco, and other small businesses, according to Internet sources.

  Circumstances provide bare hints to ponder regarding her life in London. Harriet Hosmer’s “sposa,” the ailing Louisa, Lady Ashburton, was there, about two and a half miles away at the historic Kent House on Hyde Park. Harriet had been in the United States since the Chicago expo.[804] She returned to London in 1902 and stayed until Louisa succumbed in February 1903. Then she returned to America.

  By 1905, Edmonia moved further west, to 4a Earl’s Court Road, Kensington. It is walking distance to Royal Albert Hall and the Victoria and Albert Museum. A venerable Catholic Church, Our Lady of Victories, dominated the crossroads at Kensington High Street.