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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2015
In the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War, free and fugitive persons of color were aware of the need to frame how they were seen in their everyday lives as part of an arsenal of rhetorical strategies to attract audiences to the abolitionist cause. In this article, I examine three spatial contexts that nineteenth-century mixed-race persons navigated for abolitionist ends in which their hybrid bodies were featured as an aspect of their public performances. These locations—Britain's imperially sponsored Crystal Palace, a Brooklyn church pulpit, and the dramatic reader's lectern—were not merely static places but were spaces animated and made meaningful by the interactions performed therein. Each framed a particular ocular and locational politics and strategically imbued some degree of social class privilege on the hybrid persons following its social scripts. But in so doing, each setting also reinforced colorism and contributed to notions of the supremacy of “whiteness” even while it furthered an antislavery agenda.
1. Brown, William Wells, “Speech by William Wells Brown. Delivered at the Horticultural Hall, West Chester, Pennsylvania, 23 October 1854,” in The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 4, United States, 1847–1858, ed. Ripley, C. Peter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 245–55Google Scholar, at 247. In June 1849, the American Peace Society selected Brown as a delegate to the International Peace Congress in Paris the following August. After the congress in France, Wells Brown stayed in Britain from 1849 to 1854.
2. Brown, William Wells, Three Years in Europe; or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (London: Charles Gilpin, 1852)Google Scholar. Wells Brown used the same frontispiece image in The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1855)Google Scholar. He had included a prior and somewhat more darkly shaded illustration in his earlier memoir, Narrative of William W. Brown, An American Slave. Written by Himself (London: Charles Gilpin, 1849)Google Scholar. For a discussion of frontispiece conventions, see McCaskill, Barbara, “‘Yours Very Truly’: Ellen Craft—The Fugitive as Text and Artifact,” African American Review 28.4 (1994): 509–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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4. Hartman, Saidiya V., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, 85.
5. Brown, William Wells, The Escape: Or a Leap for Freedom (Boston: P. F. Wallcut, 1858)Google Scholar. Although The Escape was not published until 1858, Brown performed it at a reading in Salem, Ohio, on 4 February 1847. See Hatch, James V., “Introduction: Two Hundred Years of Black and White Drama,” in The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, ed. Hamalian, Leo and Hatch, James (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 15–37Google Scholar, at 30.
6. William Wells Brown, “Letter to Dear Friend Garrison,” The Liberator, 12 January 1849; John L. Lord, “Letter to ‘Friend Garrison,” The Liberator, 27 April 1849.
7. I thank Mary Anne Trasciatti for her observation of the spatial dimensions of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
8. Brown, William Wells, The American Fugitive in Europe [1854], repr. in The Travels of William Wells Brown, ed. Paul Jefferson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, 234 n. 11.
9. Brown, Three Years in Europe, 225. I discuss Brown and the Crafts’ performative intervention at the Great Exhibition in Merrill, Lisa, “Exhibiting Race ‘under the World's Huge Glass Case’: William and Ellen Craft and William Wells Brown at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace, London, 1851,” Slavery and Abolition 33.2 (2012): 321–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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12. Ibid., 224.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 210.
15. “Fugitive Slaves at the Great Exhibition,” The Liberator, 18 July 1851, 116. This is a letter from William Farmer, London, to William Lloyd Garrison, dated 26 June 1851.
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18. “The Greek Slave,” New York Daily Tribune, 15 September 1847, col. 5. The Tribune proclaimed: “[T]he very choice Mr. Powers has here made is a striking proof of . . . his genius. . . . Nature is reproduced in her most ideal beauties in the proportions of that person, the outlines of those limbs, the delicate convolutions of the muscles, the absolute truth of every detail.” Anthropomorphizing the statue, the Tribune stated that Powers had depicted the sad resignation and “inward anguish which a noble-hearted woman would feel in such a case.”
19. John Tenniel, “The Virginian Slave,” wood engraving, Punch; or, The London Charivari, 17 May 1851, 236. Tenniel (1820–1914) is best known today as the illustrator of the first editions of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Punch was also one of the first sources to call Joseph Paxton's magnificent glass building the Crystal Palace.
20. Brown, Three Years in Europe, 211.
21. “Fugitive Slaves at the Great Exhibition.” Farmer described Punch's Virginian Slave as “an admirably-drawn figure of a female slave in chains, with the inscription beneath, ‘The Virginia Slave, a companion for Powers’ Greek Slave.'”
22. Ibid.
23. Fionnghuala Sweeney, in Bernier, Celeste-Marie, Newman, Judie, Lawson, Bill E., Sweeney, Fionnghuala, and Trodd, Zoe, “Round Table: Marcus Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation,” Journal of American Studies 45.1 (2011): 165–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 179.
24. “American Slavery in the World's Fair in London,” The Liberator, 28 February 1851, 36. This is a letter from Henry Clarke Wright to James M. Laughton, Dublin, Ireland, dated 5 February 1851.
25. The quotation is her husband's: “notwithstanding my wife being of African extraction on her mother's side, she is almost white.”Craft, William, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (London: William Tweedie, 1860)Google Scholar, 2. Noting the implicit racism and classist gender stereotypes that led sympathetic white women to identify with light-complected mixed-race women, Brown observed that “It seems strange to the people of this country, that one so white and so ladylike as Mrs. Craft should have been a slave”; in Brown, American Fugitive in Europe, 184–5. For these audiences, the combination of Ellen Craft's “almost white” appearance and her juridical blackness and former enslavement undermined the notion of race as a stable identity. However, Stephen Knadler has suggested that the racially ambiguous Ellen Craft may not have been perceived as black; Knadler, Stephen, “At Home in the Crystal Palace: African American Transnationalism and the Aesthetics of Representative Democracy,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 56.4 (2011): 328–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 333.
26. McCaskill, 520.
27. McFeely, William quoted in Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform, ed. Rice, Alan and Crawford, Martin (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999)Google Scholar, 4.
28. “Fugitive Slaves at the Great Exhibition.”
29. On 15 April 1848, fifteen-year-old Emily and thirteen-year-old Mary Edmonson and four of their siblings and other fugitives were captured as they attempted to escape Washington, DC, on board the The Pearl. Contemporary sources differ as to whether sufficient funds were raised by Beecher's repeated passing of the collection plate or if additional funds were later contributed at other churches. See Ricks, Mary Kay, Escape on the Pearl: The Heroic Bid for Freedom on the Underground Railroad (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007)Google Scholar.
30. Applegate, Debby, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Doubleday, 2006)Google Scholar, 227.
31. Contemporary sources differ as to whether sufficient funds were raised by Beecher's repeated passing of the collection plate or if additional funds were later contributed at other churches. See Ricks, 194–5.
32. Mrs. Beecher, Henry Ward, “When Mr. Beecher Sold Slaves in Plymouth Pulpit,” Ladies' Home Journal, December 1896, 5–6; repr. in The Ladies' Home Journal Treasury (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956), 59–63Google Scholar, at 60. On Plymouth Church as “Grand Central Depot” of Underground Railroad,” see John Strausbaugh, “On the Trail of Brooklyn's Underground Railroad, New York Times, 12 October 2007.
33. See Merrill, Lisa, “‘May She Read Liberty in Your Eyes?’: Beecher, Boucicault, and the Representation and Display of Antebellum Women's Racially Indeterminate Bodies,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 26.2 (2012): 127–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
34. Beecher, 60–1, my italics. I have been unable to determine Sarah's full name or the exact racial breakdown of the congregation in the wealthy Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, but it was undoubtedly predominantly white.
35. Oliver, Kelly, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001)Google Scholar, 157.
36. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Intensely Human,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1904, 588–96; repr. as “The Black Troops: ‘Intensely Human,’” in The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1823–1911, ed. Meyer, Howard N. ([Cambridge, MA]: Da Capo Press, 2000), 178–89Google Scholar, at 182. (Higginson himself used the phrase “almost white” here.)
37. Beecher, 61, my italics.
38. Chaney, Michael, “Mulatta Obscura: Camera Tactics and Linda Brent,” in Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, ed. Wallace, Maurice O. and Smith, Shawn Michelle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 109–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 116.
39. Thompson, Katrina Dyonne, Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014)Google Scholar, 153.
40. Beecher, 61.
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42. Quoted in Beecher, 62.
43. Ibid.
44. Oliver, Witnessing, 156.
45. Ibid., 140–1.
46. “Henry Ward Beecher,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1858, 862–70, at 869, italics in original. I have used the term “spectatorial sympathy” in other work examining the connection between Beecher's efforts in a rhetorical context and the melodramatic theatre. See Merrill, “May She Read Liberty in Your Eyes?”
47. Applegate, 237.
48. Smith, Matthew Hale, Sunshine and Shadow in New York (Hartford: J. B. Burr & Co., 1868)Google Scholar, 87.
49. Although P. Gabrielle Foreman does not discuss Beecher, she says this about “white”-appearing mixed-race women in “Who's Your Mama?: ‘White’ Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom,” in Pictures and Progres, ed. Wallace and Smith, 132–66, at 148.
50. Henry Ward Beecher's sermon on John Brown, preached at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, 30 October 1859, in Echoes of Harper's Ferry, ed. Redpath, James (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860), 257–79Google Scholar, at 277.
51. Ibid., 278.
52. Harriet Beecher Stowe to Lady Hatherton, 24 May 1856, Box 1, Folder 37, Papers of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
53. There is a voluminous literature on dramatizations of Uncle Tom's Cabin. See Meer, Sarah, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).Google Scholar
54. Stowe's full title was The Christian Slave. A Drama, Founded on a Portion of “Uncle Tom's Cabin.” Dramatized by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Expressly for the Readings of Mrs. Mary E. Webb (Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co., 1855).Google Scholar
55. Stowe to Lady Hatherton, 24 May 1856.
56. Ibid. In both the United States and British press, Mary Webb was routinely referred to as a “mulatto.” The British edition of The Christian Slave contains Frank Webb's biographical sketch where he refers to her father as “a Spanish gentleman of wealth.” See The Christian Slave: A Drama Founded on a Portion of Uncle Tom's Cabin, dramatized by Harriet Beecher Stowe, expressly for the readings of Mrs. Mary E. Webb, arranged with a short biographical sketch of The Reader, by F.J. Webb. London: Sampson, Low, Son, and Co., 1856. American Poetry, 1609-1900. Woodbridge, CT.: Research Publications, 1977. Segment III, no. 3000.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid. Webb, Frank was the author of The Garies and Their Friends (London: Routledge, 1857)Google Scholar.
59. Jacobs quoted in Rice, Alan, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (London and New York: Continuum, 2003)Google Scholar, 183.
60. By 1865, such public readings were so acceptable as a marker of cultural capital that Harvard University added a requirement in “reading English aloud” to its catalog. See Taylor, Gary, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History From the Restoration to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, 204.
61. Although P. Gabrielle Foreman says this of images of Ellen Craft, I believe this is applicable to Mary Webb as well. Foreman, 154.
62. “J,” “Mrs. Stowe's Drama,” The Liberator, 14 December 1855, 199. “J” also attributed the editing and arranging of Stowe's novel to Webb and regarded those editorial choices as evidence of Webb's talent and taste. “The selections of Mrs. Webb . . . were made with good taste and judgment, and well displayed the general scope of the drama and the manner of its execution, as a work of art.”
63. Hughes, Amy E., Spectacular Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 6.
64. Ellen Joy Letostak, “Surrogation and the [Re]Creation of Racial Vocalization: Mary E. Webb Performs The Christian Slave” (M.A. thesis, University of Georgia, 2004), 40, 30.
65. Unsigned notice, National Anti-Slavery Standard, 22 December 1855. Attributed to The Times and quoted in “Mrs. Webb's Reading,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 22 December 1855, http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/uncletom/xianslav/xsno08ot.html, accessed 23 Apr 2014.
66. See Ray, Angela G., The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005).Google Scholar
67. “The Black Siddons,” Provincial Freeman, 12 May 1855, 38; “The Black Siddons,” Frederick Douglass' Paper, 18 May 1855.
68. Attributed to The Times and quoted in “Mrs. Webb's Reading” (see note 63); my italics.
69. New York Tribune, quoted in ibid.
70. “Dramatic Readings by a Coloured Native of Philadelphia,” Illustrated London News, 2 August 1856, 121–2, at 122. Online at http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/uncletom/xianslav/xsreb01at.html, accessed 23 Apr 2014.
71. Foreman, 147.
72. “Dramatic Readings by a Coloured Native of Philadelphia.”
73. Foreman, 146–7.
74. “Dramatic Readings by a Coloured Native of Philadelphia.”
75. Jean Jewel Hotchkiss, “Dramatic Readers, Past and Present: Personal Recollections of the Greatest Exponents of a Noble Art,” Town and Country, 15 September 1906, 14–17, at 14.
76. McAllister, Marvin, White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown's African and American Theater (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)Google Scholar, 15.
77. Ibid.
78. Conquergood, Dwight, “Rethinking Elocution: The Trope of the Talking Book and Other Figures of Speech,” Text and Performance Quarterly 20.4 (2000): 325–41, at 333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
79. “Dramatic Readings by a Coloured Native of Philadelphia,” 122.
80. Conquergood, 333.
81. Letostak, 2, 42.
82. Historian Audrey Smedley argues that these beliefs are constitutive of the rise of scientific racialism. I contend that Webb's performances could serve to threaten such categories. See Smedley, Audrey, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993)Google Scholar, 27.
83. “Mrs Mary E. Webb,” The Standard (London), 29 July 1856.
84. Michie, Helena and Thomas, Ronald R., “Introduction,” in Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian age to the American Century, ed. Michie, Helena and Thomas, Ronald (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 1–20Google Scholar, at 12, my italics.
85. Nyong'o, Tavia, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)Google Scholar, 12.
86. Foreman, 151.
87. Lauren Berlant says this of Marie, the manumitted Creole character in African American novelist and suffragist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's (1896) novel, Iola Leroy. See Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, 224.
