by Jill Lepore
The Metamora of Mr. Forrest is as much like a gorilla as an Indian, and in fact more like a dignified monkey than a man…. We are told by that celebrated traveller that upon the approach of an enemy this ferocious baboon, standing upright on his hind legs, his eyes dilated, his teeth gritting and grinding, gives vent to divers snorts and grunts, and then, beating his breast fiercely with his hands till it sounds like a muffled drum, utters a loud roar. What a singular coincidence. The similarity needs scarcely be pointed out. Substitute the words “great tragedian” for “ferocious baboon,” omit the word “hind,” and you have as accurate a description of Mr. Forrest in Metamora as any reasonable man can wish.95
What such criticism reveals is a congeries of deeply racist attitudes about Indians and their capacity for language and intelligence, attitudes that lay just beneath the surface of the image of the noble savage. Well before such attitudes were articulated in any elaborate or scientific way (as they would be later in the century), the Penobscots at the Tremont Street Theater were nonetheless expected to roar. Forrest was loud, Forrest was an Indian, Indians were loud. How else could the audience enjoy the Penobscots if they failed to whoop, grunt, or chant? “Real” Indians singing a dirge at Metamora’s death scene was the perfect coda to Forrest’s own performance, especially since it also met white audiences’ expectations of Indians’ alleged credulity: Forrest’s promoters were fond of claiming that his portrayal of Metamora was so authentic “it might have deceived nature herself”—in other words, bona fide Indians might be deceived by Forrest’s performance and believe that an actual war was being waged before their own eyes—ending with an actual death. (No matter that white audiences, like the one in Augusta, Georgia, in 1831, were perhaps more likely to be tricked by Forrest’s acting.) When Alger claimed that the Penobscots at the Tremont Street Theater “chanted a dirge” to mourn Metamora’s passing, he mocked their naïveté while celebrating Forrest’s talent. But he didn’t necessarily make it up, and his version of the performance does not necessarily contradict that in the Boston Morning Post. The Penobscots might have “made no speeches” and still “chanted a dirge.” That is to say, a dirge is not speech if an Indian utters it.
“Speech” or no speech, if Alger was right and the Penobscots did chant a dirge after Metamora issued his dying curse, they had reasons of their own to do it. Recall that in an effort to recruit the support of New England congressmen for Indian removal in 1829 Andrew Jackson had asked hypothetically, “Would the people of Maine permit the Penobscot tribe to erect an independent government within their State?”96 To the Penobscots, this question apparently did not sound as absurd as it did to Maine and Massachusetts legislators. (Maine had been part of Massachusetts until 1820, and many of the Penobscots’ treaties fell under Massachusetts jurisdiction.) In November 1833 a delegation of Penobscots traveled to Boston and petitioned to do more or less what Jackson had threatened, “to erect an independent government,” to regain territory and political autonomy that had eroded in the first third of the century. The Penobscots’ claims were largely ignored, but while the delegation was spurned at the State House, it was welcomed in the theater district. In stead of regaining their land, the Penobscots were sent on a short walk across Boston Common to attend a performance of Metamora at the Tremont Street Theater.
THE PENOBSCOTS MAY HAVE failed, but other New England Indians were more successful in pressing their claims for land and autonomy during the era of Indian removal. The same year the Penobscots traveled to Boston, Wampanoag Indians living in Mashpee, Massachusetts, also filed claims against the Massachusetts government. (The Mashpees had been relatively isolated from the battles of King Philip’s War and, in the aftermath of the war, had absorbed many Wampanoag and other Indian refugees. In 1833 the Mashpee community was the largest single group of Indians living in Massachusetts.)97 In May 1833 William Apess, a Pequot Indian and Methodist minister, traveled to Mashpee and found there a community of Indians dispossessed of their own meetinghouse. Phineas Fish, a minister paid by Harvard to convert
William Apess. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library
the Mashpees to Christianity, used the Mashpee meetinghouse to preach to a congregation almost entirely made up of white parishioners. Meanwhile, neighboring whites made liberal use of Mashpee Indian land. Appalled at this treatment, Apess, after being formally adopted into the tribe, led the Mashpees in sending a petition to the governor and Council of Massachusetts, demanding that the tribe be allowed to govern itself and to protect its property. The Mashpees declared “That we as a tribe will rule ourselves and have the rights so to do for all men are born free…. That we will not permit any white man to come upon our Plantation to cut … wood … hay or any other article. … That we will have our own Meeting House, and place in the pulpit whom we please.”98 In July Apess and several Mashpees prevented a white man from taking wood from Mashpee land and were later arrested for inciting riot.
Apess’ trial brought the Mashpee case into the public eye, and in the weeks and months to follow, the “Mashpee Revolt” generated a host of petitions, newspaper editorials, and court pronouncements, many of which countered anti-Mashpee sentiment by raising the specter of Georgia’s treatment of the Cherokees and by pointing out Massachusetts’ hypocrisy in much the same way as Andrew Jackson had attempted to do five years earlier. (Jackson might well have asked, “Would the people of Massachusetts permit the Mashpee tribe to erect an independent government within their State?”) When Apess was sentenced to thirty days in prison, Benjamin Franklin Hallett, editor of the Boston Daily Advocate, asked pointedly, “Where are all our Cherokee philanthropists at this time?”99 Playing on New Englanders’ knowledge that the Mashpees, like the Penobscots, had fought alongside the colonists against the British in the American Revolution, Hallett also employed the Irvingesque image of Philip’s descendants as Revolutionary patriots, comparing the Mashpee Revolt to the Boston Tea Party: “The persons concerned in the riot, as it was called, and imprisoned for it, I think were as justifiable in what they did, as our fathers were, who threw the tea overboard.”100Much of Hallett’s rhetoric seems to have been inspired by Metamora itself. In February 1834, during or soon after the run of Metamora at the Tremont Street Theater, Hallett (a Bostonian) editorialized on behalf of the Mashpees in phrases that echo Metamora’s dying curse: “O white man! white man! the blood of our fathers, spilt in the Revolutionary War, cries from the ground of our native soil to break the chains of oppression and let our children go free.”101
Meanwhile, the Mashpees themselves were quick to employ the rhetoric of anti-Indian removal sentiment to further their own political goals. In a petition complaining about Fish’s negligence, for instance, the tribe’s representatives wrote, “Perhaps you have heard of the oppression of the Cherokees and lamented over them much, and thought the Georgians were hard and cruel creatures; but did you ever hear of the poor, oppressed and degraded Marshpee Indians in Massachusetts, and lament over them?” Similarly, on December 19, well after Apess had been released, and just a few weeks after the Penobscots sat through a performance of Metamora, the Mashpees presented an “Appeal to the White Men of Massachusetts”:
As our brethren, the white men of Massachusetts, have recently manifested much sympathy for the red men of the Cherokee nation, who have suffered much from their white brethren; as it is contended in this State, that our red brethren, the Cherokees, should be an independent people, having the privileges of the white men; we, the red men of the Marshpee tribe, consider it a favorable time to speak. We are not free. We wish to be so, as much as the red men of Georgia. How will the white man of Massachusetts ask favor for the red men of the South, while the poor Marshpee red men, his near neighbors, sigh in bondage? Will not your white brothers of Georgia tell you to look at home, and clear your own borders of oppression, before you trouble them? Will you think of this? What would be benevolence in Georgia, the red man thinks would be so in Massachusetts. You plead for the Cherokees, will y
ou not raise your voice for the red man of Marshpee?102
No doubt largely due to the poignancy of such rhetoric (and Hallett’s prominent support), the Mashpees were eventually rewarded with a type of self-government: their land was redefined as an independent district.103 The coincidence of Metamora’s run at the Tremont Street Theater in Boston and the revolt in Mashpee (about sixty miles away) suggests any number of associations—that Apess attended the play, that Hallett attended the play, that the Penobscots visited the Mashpees after they attended the play, that the Mashpees attended the play…. Unfortunately, none of these associations can be positively demonstrated, yet it seems likely that Metamora’s successful run in Boston may have in some way bolstered the Mashpees’ cause.
The case for William Apess’ familiarity with Metamora, at least, is somewhat strengthened by his subsequent fascination with Philip. In 1836 Apess appeared in Boston to deliver a popular lecture titled Eulogy on King Philip at the Odeon, just a few blocks away from the Tremont Street Theater (where Forrest returned to revive the role of Metamora regularly, possibly each November).104 Like Forrest, Apess borrowed from the conventions established in the writings of men like Washington Irving. He declared King Philip’s War “as glorious as the American Revolution,” compared Philip to George Washington, and pronounced him unequivocally “the greatest man that was ever in America.”105 Like Metamora, Apess’ address, his eulogy, also fetishized Philip’s dire end; the frontispiece engraving of the pamphlet version of his speech depicted Philip’s death scene.
Frontispiece of Apess, Eulogy on King Philip. This illustration, labeled “King Philip Dying for His Country,” shows two colonists killing a helpless Philip—only a tiny errata notice on the bottom of the very last page of the pamphlet issues the following correction: “In the Frontispiece, the man at the head of Philip, should be an Indian.” Courtesy of the Harvard College Library
More than any other early nineteenth-century commentator, William Apess collapsed the century-and-a-half divide between King Philip’s War and Indian removal. By his mere existence, Apess (although a Pequot, not a Wampanoag) gave the lie to Metamora’s subtitle, “Last of the Wampanoags.” Standing in front of the Odeon before, presumably, a largely white audience, Apess was himself, in his physical presence, evidence that New England’s Indians did not die out with Philip in August 1676. (In his autobiography, Apess recalled that when he held revival meetings, “crowds flocked out, some to hear the truth and others to see the Indian.’ “)106 Unlike the Penobscots attending Metamora, Apess did not decline to make speeches. And unlike Edwin Forrest, Apess was an “authentic” Indian, as he made clear in his Eulogy, again and again referring to Indians as “we.” Also unlike Forrest, Apess directly addressed contemporary political issues. After citing the prejudice he had faced in his own life and the unjust legislation Indians were subject to, Apess offered an ultimatum: “Give the Indian his rights, and you may be assured war will cease.” Moreover, Apess proposed a radical legacy for King Philip’s War. Quoting “Dr. Mather,” who had called Philip a man “of cursed memory,” Apess addressed the possibility that in vindicating Philip’s memory his Indian descendants might seek vengeance through attacks on Mather’s progeny. “Now we wonder if the sons of the pilgrims would have us, poor Indians, come out and curse the doctor, and all their sons, as we have been, by many of them.”107
William Apess, standing at the Odeon, threatened to curse “the sons of the pilgrims,” but he resisted the temptation. Such a curse, he believed, was itself vindictive, and, as Apess remarked, “we sincerely hope there is more humanity in us, than that.”108 Perhaps Apess was unwilling to utter a curse because he knew well that, within the conventions of the romanticized and vanished Indian, the curse was all that survived. In Whittier’s “Metacom,” as in Metamora, Philip dies but “The dying curse of Metacom, / Shall linger, with abiding power.”109 While Apess refused to offer a curse, he did offer two very special “authentic” Indian speeches. He claimed that before the outbreak of war, Philip had roused his warriors and explained his reasons for fighting against the English. In the voice of Philip, Apess began,
BROTHERS,—You see this vast country before us, which the great spirit gave to our fathers and us; you see the buffalo and deer that now are our support.
But wait … buffalo in New England? Like every other “authentic” speech by Philip, Apess’ is a fiction. Not a few historians and writers have dearly wished that Philip had left a speech. (In Metamora, Philip’s counselors even urged him, “Speak, Metamora, speak!”)110 But no such speech survives. Indeed, very little of what Philip actually said in his life survives in the written historical record. As a result, the passion for inventing a speech by Philip has found expression in nearly everything that has been written about him, beginning with the fictitious speech John Eliot included in his Indian Dialogues in 1671, in which “Philip” humbly accepts Christianity, and continuing, in 1676, with Benjamin Tompson’s version of Philip’s call to arms (“My friends, our fathers were not half so wise / As we ourselves who see with younger eyes / They sell our land to Englishmen who teach / Our nation all so fast to pray and preach”).111 Following in Eliot’s and Tompson’s footsteps, nineteenth-century writers—including Apess—found inventing a speech for Philip an irresistible temptation.112
Perhaps uncomfortable with his own fictitious Philip speech, however, William Apess decided to provide a second, even more “authentic” speech. At the end of his public oration eulogizing Metacom, Apess offered “a specimen of Philip’s language,” reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the Massachusett language (as translated by John Eliot and John Sassamon). Such a recital had probably not been offered, even privately, for more than a century. It must have been a strange day at the Odeon indeed, when Apess began, “Noo-chun kes-uk-qut-tiam-at-am unch koo-we-suonk, kuk-ket-as-soo-tam-oonk pey-au-moo-utch, keet-te-nan-tam-oo-onk ne nai….”113 Tellingly, the prayer was expected to be a crowd-pleaser; it was the one feature of Apess’ “performance” that was mentioned in a newspaper advertisement for the event: “At the close he will give a specimen of Philip’s language.”114
It could be said that if Edwin Forrest “played Indian,” so, too, did William Apess. Forrest’s rendering of Indian speech was an invented fiction, but so was Apess’. His buffalo speech was certainly as spurious as anything Forrest ever uttered. Yet Apess also subtly played with the conventions of the stage Indian, and with the expectations of his white audience. Forrest was considered “wholly Indian” because he took on the bearings and posture of an Indian; he embodied Indianness. Attempting to distinguish himself from this stage Indian, to out-Indian him, Apess fell back on the most authentic Indian speech recoverable to him in 1836—the Lord’s Prayer in Massachusett. Edwin Forrest could talk the talk. William Apess could talk the language.
IV
ONE FINAL PERFORMANCE. On the evening of November 29, 1847, on the stage of the Adelphi Theater in Boston, “Philip” died again. But this time Philip (here, too, known as “Metamora”) did not die silently. This time Philip would not stay dead. On this, the opening night of John Brougham’s brilliant burlesque Metamora; or, the Last of the Pollywogs, three English colonists (“Badenough,” “Worser,” and “Vaughan”) shoot the Pollywog leader with popguns. (“At each shot, METAMORA jumps and staggers as if shot.”) Finally, and with great flailing, Metamora falls, moaning:
I feel it’s almost time for me to slope.
The red man’s fading out, and in his place
There comes a bigger, not a better race.
Just as you’ve seen the squirming Pollywog
In course of time become a bloated frog.
(Dies.)
But the curtain does not yet fall. The trumpets do not yet sound their mournful note. The audience does not here rise in rapturous applause. Instead, the chorus sings,
We’re all dying, die, die, dying,
We’re all dying just like a flock of sheep.
To which Metamora replies,
>
You’re all lying, lie, lie, lying
You’re all lying; I wouldn’t die so cheap.
Brougham’s Metamora will not play dead. Instead he rises in a sprightly manner and, turning to the audience, harrumphs, “Confound your skins, I will not die to please you.” On hearing Metamora’s final speech, the audience at the Adelphi Theater was no doubt doubled over in rapturous laughter.”115
Nearly two decades after Forrest’s original Metamora debuted and a decade after Apess offered his Eulogy on King Philip, the ubiquitous Indian speechifying in Metamora, delivered in Forrest’s uniquely ear-piercing style, had become the subject of parody. John Brougham’s wonderfully titled Metamora; or, the Last of the Pollywogs exploited the conventions of the costume Indian: “With rifle, belt, plume, moccasin, and all, / Just as you would see them at a fancy ball.” And Brougham employed a different kind of “Indian speak” to mock Forrest’s bellowing style: “Ugh” is one of Brougham’s Metamora’s more frequent lines. But this Metamora, and his witless wife “Tapiokee,” also mock the melodramatic conventions of Forrest’s soliloquies and the trope of the dying Indian. When the Pollywog warriors leave the stage to fight the English, Brougham’s Metamora stays behind to address the audience and appease their demand for a rousing war cry and impassioned explanation of Philip’s motives:
It’s very probable you’d like to know
The reason why the Pollywog don’t go
With his red brethren. Pray take notice, each,
He stops behind to have an exit speech. And here it is:— (Takes stage …)
Into the foe a feet or two I’ll walk!