A talented and single young American female in Rome, however, drew suspicion and envy in the tight-knit expat community. Hawthorne eventually refused to see her when rumors of scandal—she might have posed for a colleague as a model, thus soiling her reputation—dogged Lander. She continued work on the final and nearly life-sized Dare statue in white Carrara marble, completing it in 1860. But living in Rome as an outcast became unbearable, so she returned to the United States just as the Civil War began.
Before departing, Lander placed the statue on another ship bound for America that sank in the Mediterranean Sea off the Spanish coast. Unfazed, she paid salvagers to haul it from the water two years later. She had the statue boxed up again and put on another ship that arrived in Boston by 1863, in the middle of the bloody conflict. By then, Lander had lost her own brother, a poet and explorer, to pneumonia while he fought rebels in Virginia. As Confederate and Union forces battled at Gettysburg, she boldly placed the sculpture on exhibit in her Boston studio as “the National Statue.”
Critics declared it “essentially and entirely American” and a “fresh example” of a new kind of American art. One wrote that the image “blended characteristics of both races…into one harmonious physique.” It was a contentious subject in an era when many states in the North as well as the South forbade racial mixing. The Indian theme of her sculpture suggested that to be American meant to acknowledge and incorporate aspects of the indigenous people then so feared and despised.
Lander elaborated in an interview: “This design shows that we have in our own country rich subjects for sculpture without resorting to the old heathen mythology.” Virginia Dare promised a forward-looking American art unencumbered by Old World conventions.
A New York collector bought the statue for the huge sum of five thousand dollars and had it installed in his apartment. Before he had paid for it, a fire broke out that killed the collector but didn’t damage the statue. His heirs refused to honor the purchase, and the marble Virginia Dare went to live again with Lander, now in her new home in Washington. She kept it in her sitting room until her death in 1923, when it was willed to the State of North Carolina.
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A week before the Civil War began, virtuous Virginia Dare took on a menacing aspect. The wife of a North Carolina Episcopal minister, Mary Mason, published a three-part serial in the Raleigh Register that drew on a popular William Wordsworth poem. In her version, an evil shaman turns the girl into a white doe. When a party of English hunters wounds the deer years later, she reverts to her human form long enough to thank her killers for freeing her from the spell and cursing the “red men of America.” They were, the expiring Virginia said, unworthy to continue “possession of this noble and beautiful land.” It was no wonder that God “has suffered a superior and advancing race of his creatures to supplant them in their rich and noble birthright.”
The author notes approvingly that the dying girl “lives to witness their extinction and the wide occupation of their forfeited patrimony by that superior Race, the Anglo Saxon, with their bondsmen, the sable African, the red man’s inferior.”
The final serial appeared as Virginia and North Carolina wavered on leaving the Union; the article next to the story was titled “Secession Practically Considered.” One week later, rebel forces bombed Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, sparking the Civil War. As the nation violently clashed over slavery and the status of African Americans, Virginia Dare began to assume a new role. No longer an innocent figure sprinting through the woods of Roanoke Island, she emerged in postwar America as a potent symbol of the inevitable dominance of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Her star rose in tandem with growing fears in the 1890s that America’s founding culture was under siege. Italians and eastern European Jews crowded into New York, Chicago, and other northern cities by the millions, bringing unfamiliar traditions derided by many northern European whites as barbaric. Simultaneously in the South, the newly achieved rights of African Americans led to a violent backlash in the form of vigilante justice and harsh Jim Crow laws designed to limit their power. Under her romantic gloss, Virginia Dare reminded former Confederates of their own failure and loss and the threat posed by dark savages—now identified as the freed slaves rather than vengeful Indians. For the fast-expanding nation as a whole, she became “the patron saint of manifest destiny” and a kind of “Protestant Madonna” who could “exert a pervasive moral influence over the savage pagans,” historian Robert Arner writes.
Virginia Dare sounded an alarm and promised the ultimate triumph of Anglo-Saxon civilization over the barbarians, and she did so with sex appeal. White’s granddaughter, Arner adds, mutated into a “forbidding threatening goddess” capable of killing with ease, as well as “the all American girl dressed up in revealingly scanty doeskins.”
No one made better use of this disturbing figure than Sallie Southall Cotten, later hailed as a leading southerner in the women’s movement. An inveterate organizer and writer, Cotten lived much of her adult life on a remote thousand-acre farm in northeastern North Carolina raising nine children, three of whom died in childhood. She fought a long personal crusade to give Virginia Dare a more prominent place in the American pantheon, a crusade deeply tied to the era’s expanding movements for white supremacy and women’s rights.
Appointed to a committee planning her state’s participation in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the forty-six-year-old Cotten went to Roanoke Island to choose white holly wood trees to be cut near “Old Fort Raleigh,” to fashion a desk displaying scenes from the Roanoke voyages for display in Chicago. A local newspaper reported her tramping through the woods, “stirring the ashes of historic memories, and cultivating patriotic sentiments on the spot where the first white American child was born.”
She hoped memorializing the events on the island “will moisten the eye with the sad memory of the lost colony and awaken heartfelt pride that the first birth of that great race that now rules the continent was the product of North Carolina soil, and feminine pride that was the birth of a girl child.” This was, she wrote, the American “Bethlehem story.” (She wasn’t alone in using biblical terms; one contemporary historian called Roanoke “that inevitable John the Baptist,” preparing the way for Jamestown.)
With six other women, Cotten chartered the Virginia Dare Columbian Memorial Association on August 18, 1892, Dare’s birthday, with the goal of publicizing “the first white child born on American soil.” Though it seems strange today, the numerous earlier births and baptisms of Spanish children in what became Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina did not count, because they and their southern European mothers were not considered white. North Carolina was, she wrote later, where “the history of America, and the history of white women in America, began.” That year marked the opening of Ellis Island as well as the national peak in African American lynchings.
Cotten printed up a tract on Virginia Dare, a biographer says, that she “foisted on just about everyone she met” at the World’s Fair that opened the following May. She failed to garner much enthusiasm amid belly-dancing exhibitions and the turning of the first Ferris wheel. She took heart, however, when the nickel she put in a Midway slot machine noted her weight—141 pounds—and predicted, “For you I see a heroic effort and handsome reward.”
Cotten then encouraged a group of businessmen to create the Roanoke Colony Memorial Association in 1894 and became its only female board member. The association bought and protected the Fort Raleigh site; it was the same group that gave archaeologist Talcott Williams permission to excavate. The association president declared Roanoke of “supreme importance in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race in America.”
The same year the association was formed, prominent citizens on Roanoke Island founded another organization—the Manteo White Supremacy Club. At one meeting, the club considered celebrating Virg
inia Dare’s upcoming birthday “with a grand white supremacy rally” to celebrate “the first white child born upon American soil,” according to Raleigh’s Morning Post. The event would underscore the group’s “determination to protect at all hazards the pure womanhood of North Carolina and perpetuate white supremacy to our latest posterity.” They hoped for a speaker “on fire with a deathless love for the defenseless women and helpless children of the dear old State and for good government administered by white men.”
Memorializing Virginia Dare was not simply a patriotic way to mark the nation’s founding, then, but part of a concerted effort to ensure whites remained in firm control. Honoring the Raleigh voyages was a way to reinforce the ruling race’s domination. In 1896, the Supreme Court backed strict segregation laws in the South; shortly after, North Carolina lawmakers “at last disenfranchised the Negro,” Cotten noted approvingly. In 1902 Carter Glass, a Virginia politician and later United States Secretary of the Treasury, backed his state’s plan to limit black voters and thereby ensure “complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government.” The following year, W. E. B. Du Bois, the African American activist and historian, proclaimed that he only wished it possible “for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed or spit upon by his fellows.”
In this charged Jim Crow environment, Cotten wrote a “Hiawatha”-like poem called “The White Doe” in which an evil shaman turns Virginia Dare into a deer. “She, the heir of civilization, they, the slaves of superstition,” summed up Cotten’s view of Anglo whites versus other ethnicities. Later, the innocent creature is fatally wounded by the wicked Wanchese with an enchanted silver arrow and dies in the arms of an adoring Indian brave at a sacred spring, which at her tragic demise dries up and produces scuppernong grapes. He turns the white grapes into juice; Virginia Dare’s transformation into a Jesus-like American savior is complete.
The silver arrow, Cotten’s poem explains pedantically, “was the gleaming light of Progress, speeding from across the sea,” that produced “the vine of Civilization in the wilderness of strife.” It’s an interpretation, the historian Arner notes, “that would have done credit to George Bancroft.” Both the poet and the historian saw white progress as the broom to sweep away backward Native American culture—and, by extension, African American culture as well. Dare sacrificed herself in this noble cause.
Cotten set off on an eccentric national tour in the late 1890s to read her lengthy and turgid work in halls usually given to vaudeville and other popular entertainments. To make the recitals more dramatic, the southern matron, then in her fifties, traded her severe black Victorian dresses and hats for a supple pale doeskin. In Washington, she performed in the elderly Lander’s sitting room solely for the benefit of the sculptor and her famous statue.
She maintained the common view among southern whites of her day that segregation was critical for genetic as well as cultural reasons. Most states, North and South, forbade interracial marriages. During a visit to Cuba, Cotten was horrified to discover “its people are a hopelessly mixed race,” adding, “To this I seriously object forever.” The result was “to degrade a superior race.” At an 1897 meeting of the National Congress of Mothers, she called for “scientific motherhood” to create “a grander, nobler race.” Such ideas presaged the rise of eugenics, the belief and practices aimed at improving the genetics of a group, which became popular in both the United States and Nazi Germany in subsequent decades.
In this climate, any suggestion that the Lost Colonists assimilated with Native Americans, who were seen by many whites as genetically inferior, was strictly taboo. Virginia Dare might dress like an Indian, but she had to die before she could produce a hybrid degenerate. Nor was this view held solely below the Mason-Dixon line. Under the headline “Virginia Dare Made Symbol of Earliest U.S. Womanhood,” the Providence Bulletin concluded, “The ancient Greeks would doubtless have regarded her untimely taking as an ordained sacrifice to the gods.”
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In 1907, immigration into the United States peaked at 1.3 million. Cotten’s campaign prompted North Carolina artist and poet Mary Hilliard Hinton, a Colonial Dame and Daughter of the Confederacy, to make Virginia Dare the centerpiece of her state’s contribution to the exposition that year, celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, considered the first permanent English settlement in the New World. Signs in the exhibit proudly proclaimed White’s granddaughter the first “infant child of pure Caucasian blood” who launched “the birth of the white race in the Western Hemisphere” and the “advent of the white woman in America.”
When President Theodore Roosevelt visited the exposition held in nearby Norfolk, he didn’t tour Hinton’s exhibit. But in a speech attended by thousands, he rejected growing talk of what many were calling “race suicide” amid fears that the refugees would dilute Anglo-American blood and destroy the country’s moral fabric. The newcomers, the president told the crowd, would quickly assimilate. The current tide of immigration was an extension of the past three centuries that produced “a new and distinct ethnic type” that “has never been fixed in blood.”
Roanoke Island emerged in this era as a pilgrimage site for Anglo-Americans seeking to reaffirm their racial dominance at the annual celebration of Virginia Dare’s birth and baptism. “White civilization is triumphant because it is best,” North Carolina lieutenant governor Francis Winston declared categorically in a 1908 speech there. “The Indian is gone; there is no room on earth today for vicious, incompetent, and immoral races. White civilization is triumphant because it is best.” It would have been obvious to his audience that he was speaking of contemporary white power over African Americans. At the 1910 picnic, North Carolina’s Episcopal bishop, Joseph Blount Cheshire Jr., admonished the assembled crowd to “not degrade the memory of these early pioneers in the settlement of America by supposing that they at once forgot their Christian nature, and voluntarily and promptly sunk into heathen barbarism, within less than one generation.” The bishop insisted that the settlers instead endured “a nobler fate”—that is, heroic deaths at the hands of the Indians akin to martyrdom. Better to die than assimilate.
Virginia Dare gave her name and blond locks to a series of sweet wines popular during the first half of the twentieth century and revived by Francis Ford Coppola in the early twenty-first century. Francis Ford Coppola Winery
Hinton, an Anglican and niece to a governor, was so taken with the speech that she had it published. “To be white and of Anglo-Saxon descent and a member of the Episcopal Church was, in their view, to be living at the very pinnacle of civilization,” explained the Reverend Donald Lowery, rector of the Church of the Holy Innocents in the town of Henderson west of Roanoke Island. “The amazing thing is that as racist as his views sound, Cheshire was considered a progressive on race issues in his day.”
In the meantime, Cotten’s poem, published in 1901, proved popular enough to win a commercial sponsor. A winemaker mailed a copy to any interested reader. “Compliments of Garrett and Co. Pioneer American wine growers, Norfolk, VA, producers of the famous Virginia Dare brand of Scuppernong wine,” read a flyer that the company inserted into each copy. An early label called her “The First Lady of the Land.”
It wasn’t the first or last time the infant of Roanoke, now invariably portrayed as a beautiful young woman, was a vehicle for commerce. As early as 1871, Virginia Dare Tobacco was a popular brand, featuring a blonde with exposed breasts standing beside a lake in a forest surrounded by swans. Virginia Dare Wine, however, proved more enduring than her tobacco. (One uncharitable reviewer suggested its success rested on the fact that Cotten’s long and tedious work was best appreciated drunk.) The label featured a smiling white teenager with blond curls. One of the advertisements urged customers to “touch the lips to Virginia Dare Wine.” The purity and whiteness extended even to the color of the beverage. “Virg
inia Dare will appeal to every lover of a clean, sound, wholesome wine,” notes Paul Garrett in his 1905 The Art of Serving Wine. “The original scuppernong has a white skin and makes a white wine.” The company’s Pocahontas wine was naturally made with red grapes; there was no blending of reds and whites. The more romantically inclined believed that the white wine came from grapes harvested from Roanoke Island’s Mother Vineyard that grew from the sacred spring washed with Virginia Dare’s blood.
In the immediate aftermath of World War I, the chameleonic Virginia Dare took on yet another role. She emerged as a symbol of a new generation of women eager to win the right to vote. Politicians in the South, all white males, feared that black women might use the ballot box to upset white dominance. In 1920, state legislators in Raleigh gathered to consider the nineteenth constitutional amendment, which would grant women the franchise. Suffragette Gertrude Weil, a progressive Jewish activist in eastern North Carolina, dismissed “the menace of the negro woman’s vote” as a red herring. “Equal suffrage does not necessarily imply universal suffrage,” she insisted, assuring nervous legislators that gender equality would not threaten white dominance.
Weil, whose mother was a protégée of Cotten’s, argued forcefully that more white female voters would in fact assure white supremacy. To make her case, her organization published a broadside that read, “We Plead in the Name of Virginia Dare that North Carolina Remain White.” She also insisted that she favored “higher qualifications” to exclude black men as well as black women from casting ballots. The legislature narrowly failed to support the amendment. Neighboring Tennessee did, however, and national suffrage was assured women on August 18, 1920—the birthday of Virginia Dare.
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