by Jill Lepore
IV
THE COLONISTS’ public and private commemorations of King Philip’s War in the early years—the almanacs, the skulls on poles, the books, the stories told out loud, the bullet holes shown to children—were intended to keep the story of King Philip’s War alive for the edification of generations to come, but most public commemorations were also intended to keep a particular version of the story alive, a version that excluded alternate interpretations.76 They succeeded. Because few Indians in early New England learned to read and write after Eliot’s missionary efforts failed, it remains difficult today for historians to discover those alternate interpretations. But some evidence nonetheless survives of the rich traditions of storytelling by which Algonquians in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century New England preserved memories of the war, perhaps none more tantalizing than a Narragansett tradition recorded in the 1930s. According to this Narragansett story,
when Philip was killed his faithful warriors, not being able to steal the whole body, for fear of detection, stole the head of their chief and hid it … until they could safely bury it, with all the sacred rituals due the mighty chief, who [died] for home and people.
Though “the great sachem’s head is buried between Taunton and Mt. Hope, … no one knows its resting place.” Perhaps attempting to find his way to Cautantowwit’s house, Philip’s ghost “walks abroad” every three generations and reveals the true site of his head’s final resting place to a medicine man.77 Forget Benjamin Church, forget Alderman, forget the Plymouth day of thanksgiving. This account fully contradicts every contemporary description of Philip’s execution. It lends to Philip’s grisly death an air of quiet dignity, even as it leaves him wandering, restlessly, forever. Philip is long dead, but his war still rages. But is the skull missing its jaw?
Chapter 8
THE CURSE OF METAMORA
On the evening of December 15, 1829, on the stage of the Park Theater in New York City, “Philip” died again. But this time, Philip (here also known as “Metamora”) did not die silently. This time, at least, Philip had the last word. When Benjamin Church and his soldiers fired, Metamora fell, but cried,
My curses on you, white men! May the Great Spirit curse you when he speaks in his war voice from the clouds! Murderers! The last of the Wampanoags’ curse be on you! May your graves and the graves of your children be in the path the red man shall trace! And may the wolf and panther howl o’er your fleshless bones, fit banquet for the destroyers! Spirits of the grave, I come! But the curse of Metamora stays with the white man!
On hearing Metamora’s final speech, the audience at the Park Theater rose in wild and reportedly “rapturous” applause.1
Beginning with this, its opening night, Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags resurrected the story of King Philip’s War for generations of Americans; it was performed until at least 1887 and was one of the most widely produced plays in the history of nineteenth-century theater. Metamora reinterpreted not only Philip’s death scene but also many of the main events of the war. It told of “Sassamond” ’s betrayal of Philip and of his subsequent murder (“So should the treacherous man fall, by the keen knife in the darkness”); of the colonists’ suspicion of conspiracy (“Philip, ’tis thought you … plot with the Narragansetts, and contrive fatal disorder to our colony”); of Philip’s struggles with the colonists over land (“No! White man, no! Never will Metamora … let the plough of the strangers disturb the bones of his kindred”); and of the capture of his wife, “Nahmeokee,” and their son (after which Metamora warns the English, “If one drop fall from Nahmeokee’s eye, one hair from her head, the axe shall hew your quivering limbs asunder”).2
At its peak, in the 1830s and 1840s, Metamora held enormous popular appeal. Lines from the play became household words, “as familiar upon the public’s tongue as the name of Washington.” Across America “boys of ten years old could be seen and heard almost anywhere taking the position of Metamora … and exclaiming: ‘Metamora cannot lie!’ Older persons would frequently quote: ‘The good man’s heart should be a stranger to fear and his tongue ever ready to speak the words of truth.’ “3 Many Americans, no doubt, also committed to memory Metamora’s devastating, dying curse.
Meanwhile, just a week before that late-fall day in 1829 when Metamora debuted in New York, a very different scene was taking place in the nation’s capital. There, on December 8, 1829, the newly elected president, Andrew Jackson, delivered his first annual address, an address with fateful consequences for American Indians. Even as stagehands at the Park Theater prepared the sets for Metamora’s opening, Jackson declared his intention to implement a policy that had come to be called “Indian removal.” Jackson proposed to relocate large numbers of southeastern Indians—Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—to lands west of the Mississippi, by force if necessary. Such a move would at once clear eastern tribal lands for white settlers and rid southern states—Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, and Jackson’s home state, Tennessee—of their pernicious “Indian problems”: illicit trading, violent skirmishes, and fraudulent land sales. In the 1830s Jackson’s Indian removal policy would divide the nation, its Congress, and its highest court. It would also bring untold misery to thousands of native peoples. Most infamously, the Trail of Tears would claim the lives of one of every four Cherokees marching from Georgia to Oklahoma in 1838. Disease, malnutrition, and exposure would cut the population of other tribes in half. When the furious dust settled, those “removed” Indians who survived to cross the Mississippi were left in a strange land with few resources.4
Presidents before Jackson had advocated Indian removal, just as plays about Indians had been performed before Metamora. But Metamora’s debut and Jackson’s address, separated by seven short days in December 1829, intensified and accelerated two developments: the popularity of Indian plays and the pursuit of Indian removal.5 Two developments? Or were they one? Did the same forces that brought thousands of Americans to see Metamora also lead them to support sending thousands of Cherokees to Oklahoma? And if so, why a play about Philip alias Metacom alias Metamora, “last of the Wampanoags”? A century and a half after Philip’s death, why did Americans crane their necks in crowded theaters everywhere to see him die yet again—this time defiantly—even as Cherokees fell by the roadside, collapsing with exhaustion?
Metamora, the play, is a tragedy. Metamora, the Indian removal-era phenomenon, is a many-layered mystery. Old cruelties, new cruelties. Old curses, new curses. Peel back all the layers—the play’s origins, its actors, its audiences, its critics—and what remains is a struggle for American and Indian identity. Through plays like Metamora, white Americans came to define themselves in relation to an imagined Indian past. That definition, however, required that there be no Indians in the present, or at least not anywhere nearby. While Metamora played across the country and Americans everywhere read Coopers Leatherstocking Tales by the fireside, the federal government sought support for removing eastern Indians west of the Mississippi partly by invoking images like those popularized in Indian plays and Indian fiction. At the same time, Indians in New England (and possibly elsewhere) turned such images to their own advantage, negotiating the tangled logic of the noble savage and the rhetoric of Indian removal to hold on to their tribal lands and even build momentum for a movement to found a new kind of Indian identity. In the nineteenth century, Philip would come to be the central figure in the story of the war that bears his name, and that story would prove to be even more malleable than it had been during the American Revolution. Those who told it put the story of King Philip’s War to many, and often contradictory, uses.
No story about King Philip’s War was more popular than Metamora, and no act of historical ventriloquism is more intriguing than Metamora’s dying curse.6 When Philip was shot on August 12, 1676, Benjamin Church had damned him: “Forasmuch as he had caused many an Englishman’s body to be unburied, and to rot above ground … not one of his bones should be buried.” After Phi
lip had been drawn and quartered, Increase Mather had prayed, “So let all thine Enemies perish, O Lord!” Even the Indian who hacked up the corpse had made a “small speech” to Philip, saying “he would now chop his arse for him.”7 But Philip himself said nothing (or, if he did, no one recorded it). A century and a half later, when Metamora debuted in New York in 1829, Philip finally spoke up. As Metamora fell, dying, he cried, “My curses on you, white men!” … and white audiences applauded, rapturously.
I
THE MAN who delivered Metamora’s curse was the incredible Edwin Forrest. Far and away the most celebrated American actor of the nineteenth-century stage, Forrest was a burly, broad, and muscular man, much mocked for his unusually large calves (a favorite subject of cartoon caricatures). In later life he would become embittered by a very public and very scandalous divorce, but in the 1820s the young Forrest was just emerging as Americas dramatic darling, a theatrical star large enough to rival the fame of more established European actors.8 In 1828, in the spirit of cultivating “native” American literature dealing with distinctly American themes (and acquiring a play whose title role would be designed to exploit his unique acting talents), Forrest offered five hundred dollars for “the best tragedy, in five acts, of which the hero, or principal character, shall be an aboriginal of this country.”9 The Committee of Award, headed by William Cullen Bryant, selected a script written by John Augustus Stone, a playwright and actor originally from Concord, Massachusetts.10 Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags quickly became, and remained, Forrest’s most successful moneymaker. When he held a lengthy engagement in Mobile, Alabama, in 1844, for instance, his theater receipts for Metamora were far greater than for any other performance—twice the receipts for Macbeth and King Lear in an age when Shakespeare typically thrilled the theatergoing public. In twenty-five years Philadelphia had only two seasons without Metamora.11
Metamora made Forrest so much money that the play inspired dozens of imitations and, later, parodies. Fueled by Metamora’s success, serious and silly “Indian plays” came to dominate American big-city theaters and small-town playhouses, much to the dismay of many highbrow critics, who found the melodramatic Metamora and its imitators irretrievably schmaltzy.12” By 1846 James Rees could complain that Indian dramas “had become a perfect nuisance.”13 But Metamora remained one of the most popular of them all. In the frontier states of Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan, towns (and probably streets, too) were named after the play’s Indian hero.14 King Philip fever ran high. Antiquarians collected and displayed newly “discovered” relics from the war—King Philip’s bowl, King Philip’s war club, King Philip’s pipe and belt—while a Metamora-inspired Philip became the subject of everything from dime novels to nursery rhymes.15 Such excesses prompted one observer to complain in 1838 that the “bloody Indian” was now “glorified in Congress; canonized by philanthropists; autobiographed, and lithographed, and biographed, by authors, artists, and periodicals.”16
Dime novel about King Philip, alias Metamora, c. 1870. Courtesy of the John Carter Library, Brown University
Poster for Metamora, 1854. Courtesy of the Crawford Theatre Collection, Yale University
Although Edwin Forrest prepared for the role of Metamora well before the proliferation of Philip paraphernalia, he was not wholly without source material. The most promising clues about what those sources might have been come from an inventory of Forrest’s library taken in 1863 (the year he had many of his books and personal effects cataloged and sold, including his Metamora wardrobe).17 Forrest owned more than a few books about King Philip’s War. The bulk of these were published before 1829, and it seems likely that Forrest purchased them while studying for Metamora. Among these works, for instance, was James Fenimore Cooper’s 1827 novel about King Philip’s War, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (which failed as a novel but became a successful play and even a ballet).18 More significantly, Forrest owned an essay by Washington Irving called “Philip of Pokanoket,” first published in 1814 and widely reprinted in Irving’s popular Sketchbook collection.19 Irving’s
King Philip nursery rhyme, 1853. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society
portrait of Philip would come to be closely associated with Metamora—some newspapers went so far as to reprint “Philip of Pokanoket” alongside reviews of the play, while the Princess Theatre included a lengthy excerpt from the essay on its advertising poster for Metamora—and it requires careful consideration.20
Washington Irving decided to write about Philip after consulting several early histories of King Philip’s War and finding himself disgusted with the colonists’ accounts, especially Increase Mather’s Brief History, in which, he claimed, Mather
dwells with horror and indignation on every hostile act of the Indians, however justifiable, whilst he mentions with applause the most sanguinary atrocities of the whites. Philip is reviled as a murderer and a traitor without considering that he was a true born prince, gallantly fighting at the head of his subjects to avenge the wrongs of his family; to retrieve the tottering power of his line; and to deliver his native land from the oppression of usurping strangers.
Offering a corrective to Mather’s history, Irving urged his readers to see beyond the prejudices of the early historians of the war that they might better appreciate Philip’s virtue and mourn that he had died “like a lonely bark foundering amid darkness and tempest—without a pitying eye to weep his fall, or a friendly hand to record his struggle.”21
While the Mathers had considered Philip a devilish, barbarous villain and even, in Cotton’s words, a “blasphemous leviathan,” Washington Irving recast the Wampanoag leader as an honorable, patriotic hero, nobler than the noblest of noble savages. In effect, Irving reversed the version of King Philip’s War that had been popular during the American Revolution. In 1775 Americans had been asked to think of the British as simply “more distant savages” than the Indian neighbors their forefathers had fought in 1675. They had seen King Philip’s War (American colonists vs. redskins) as a crude rehearsal for the American Revolution (American colonists vs. redcoats).22 Washington Irving disagreed. He asked Americans to identify less with Mather, Church, and Hubbard and more with Metacom and his warriors. Philip, in living’s estimation, was a courageous leader struggling to free his people from the foreign tyranny embodied by colonial authorities.23
Both Edwin Forrest and the playwright John Augustus Stone seem to have been influenced by Irving’s “Philip of Pokanoket.” Their Metamora quite literally enacted Irving’s reversal of the Revolutionary-era version of the war. In Stone’s script Metamora himself was even made to echo Patrick Henry: “Our lands! Our nation’s freedom! Or the grave!”24 And, not long after the play’s stunning debut, a writer for the prominent North American Review praised Philip as a leader who “did and endured enough to immortalize him as a warrior, a statesman, and we may add, as a high-minded and noble patriot.”25
In addition to Irving’s Sketchbook, Edwin Forrest’s library also included copies of two epic poems about King Philip’s War: Robert Southey’s unfinished “Oliver Newman, A New-England Tale” (begun in 1815) and James Eastburn and Robert Charles Sands’ Yamoyden: A Tale of the Wars of King Philip (published in 1820).26 Although Irving’s essay partly inspired these endeavors, the original seventeenth-century chronicles remained their chief source of information. Recalling how he and Eastburn came to write Yamoyden, Sands explained, “We had then read nothing of the subject; and our plot was formed from a hasty glance into a few pages of Hubbard’s Narrative.”27Finally, Forrest owned a copy of Benjamin Church’s original history of the war in an 1827 reprint edition. How this book’s text might have influenced Forrest is unclear, but its chief illustration, a copy of Paul Revere’s 1772 engraving of Philip, seems to have caught Forrest’s eye.28 That Revere’s engraving influenced Forrest’s costuming is powerfully suggested by comparing it to Mathew Brady’s photograph of Forrest as Metamora. Forrest’s “Last of the Wampanoags”—his belt, moccasins, headband
, and even posture—all seem to echo Reveres “Philip. King of Mount Hope.”
LEFT: Paul Reveres King Philip. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society RIGHT: Edwin Forrest as Metamora, from a photograph by Matthew Brady. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University.
To portray Philip, then, Edwin Forrest borrowed from Washington Irving, who borrowed (if grudgingly) from Increase Mather; from Eastburn and Sands, who borrowed from William Hubbard; and from Paul Revere (who had himself copied his Philip from John Simons 1710 engraving of Mohawk chief Joseph Brant).29 Metamora was a strange hybrid indeed. Clearly, while Forrest’s Metamora flowered in the nineteenth century, he was nonetheless rooted in the rich soil of myth, memory, and history.
EDWIN FORREST LOVED history, and he loved the idea of America. In soliciting and performing a play about “an aboriginal of this country,” he saw himself as embracing his nation’s past and, more specifically, advancing the cause of American literary independence from England. At the debut performance of Metamora in 1829, a poetic epilogue celebrated Stone as the “native bard” who, along with Forrest, “a native actor too, / Have drawn a native picture to your view.”30 Riding on the success of Metamora, Forrest later publicly boasted of his efforts “to give to my country, by fostering the exertions of our literary friends, something like what might be called an American national drama.”31 In 1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, “We will walk with our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds,” but three years earlier, Edwin Forrest had insisted, rather more prosaically, “Our literature should be independent.”32