by Jill Lepore
29Branford Swan, An Indian’s an Indian, or the Several Sources of Paul Revere’s Engraved Portrait of King Philip (Providence: Rhode Island Society of Colonial Wars, 1959).
30The text of the epilogue is reprinted in the New-York Mirror, and Ladies’ Literary Gazette, December 29, 1829.
31Quoted in Jeffrey D. Mason, “The Politics of Metamora” 99. Forrest’s political rhetoric was not always limited to the cultural sphere; in 1838 he considered running for Congress, after an enthusiastic reception to his Independence Day address. See Edwin Forrest, Oration Delivered at the Democratic Republican Convention … Fourth July 1838 (New York: 1838).
32Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar, an Address Delivered … 1837 (New York: The Laurentian Press, 1901).
33Albion, September 2, 1848, quoted in Barnard Hewitt, Theater USA (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 109. Emphasis mine.
34Moody, Edwin Forrest, 220.
35See Account of the Terrific and Fatal Riot at the New-York Astor Place Opera House (New York: 1849) and Richard Moody, The Astor Place Riot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958). On Forrest vs. Macready, American vs. European, see Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 68-75; Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow, 63-68.
36Quoted in Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow, 66.
37Richard Moody writes, “In physical proportions Metamora was the model for all later Indians in painting and sculpture. He was the embodiment of all those qualities that today are immediately brought to mind by the mention of the ‘noble red man’” (Moody, America Takes the Stage, 94). Richard Slotkin and James Folsom briefly allude to this transformation in So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, 1676-1677 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 42-43. Curiously, Forrest was, according to Moody, “the only actor who ever gained much distinction from acting the noble red man” (Moody, America Takes the Stage, 96). On the broader phenomenon of “playing Indian” see Philip Deloria’s brilliant and important “Playing Indian: Otherness and Authenticity in the Assumption of American Indian Identity” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994).
38As Brian Dippie has remarked, “The Indian, as the First American, was necessary to any such attempt at self-definition. He was the American past” (Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1972], 16).
39Albion, September 2, 1848. The New-York Mirror, December 14, 1833.
40New York Morning Herald, December 28, 1837, quoted in Mason, “Politics of Metamora” 104-05.
41Alger, Life of Edwin Forrest, 238-40.
42Ibid.
43Harrison, Edwin Forrest, 37.
44Moody, Edwin Forrest, 342.
45Alger, Life of Edwin Forrest, 126-27, 137-39. Forrest also considered Metamora his finest character (untitled Philadelphia newspaper clipping, 1867, Edwin Forrest Clippings File, Scrapbook, Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University).
46Ibid.
47A rich literature on American masculinity has recently emerged, much of it a departure from earlier, important work by Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). See E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996); and Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
48Irving, “Philip of Pokanoket,” 363-64.
49Others have argued that Forrest’s performance as Metamora was specifically enacting a Jacksonian ideal of individualism (Eric Ray Marshall, “Playwriting Contests and Jacksonian Democracy, 1829-1841” [Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1983], 188-96; see also 137-38, 141, 145-49).
50See Sullivan on “Americanization” of the Indian (“Indians in American Fiction,” 239-57). David Grimsted points out that early nineteenth-century critics looking for a distinctive American literature argued that in drama “the first essential” was “nationality” (Melodrama Unveiled, 138).
51Increase Mather, The Necessity of Reformation (Boston, 1679), 5.
52American Quarterly Review 8 (1830): 145.
53John Gorham Palfrey. “Review of Yamoyden,” North American Review 12 (1821): 480-88. Palfrey wrote,
in this particular instance, where the contest was equally on both sides for existence, it strikes us as no better than sentimentality to represent [the English colonists] as remorseless oppressors, and the other party as cruelly wronged…. Politically speaking, Philip had perhaps a right to attempt to rid the country of his English neighbors; but, politically speaking, they had an equal right to keep their ground, if they could.
Palfrey cited Josiah Winslow (who had claimed, “I think I can clearly say, that before these present troubles broke out, the English did not possess…. but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase …”) approvingly and argued that Western ideas of just war cannot be used to evaluate King Philip’s War. “It was a conflict in which the existence of one party depended on the destruction of the other. The Indians, had they known how to use it, had an overwhelming superiority of force; and though there are sentiments of humanity which under all circumstances generous minds respect, yet in the contest with such an enemy,—so wanton and so impracticable,—Grotius and Vattel lose their authority.”
Palfrey’s lament about the historical inaccuracy of representing Philip as a hero did not go entirely unheeded. In 1834 a writer for the Western Monthly Magazine prefaced an article about Philip by declaring, “It is not my intention to inflict upon the reader a fictitious tale of Indian cruelties. I am aware that for a few years past the press has been prolific, in publications illustrative of Indian life and character; that the public taste has become in a degree satiated with this kind of reading.” Instead, this writer offered mixed praise. Philip, he argued,
was brave, artful and ambitious; his savage nature by the treachery and encroachments of the whites, had been wrought up to the highest pitch of relentless ferocity; and he engaged in this christian war of extermination, with the unalterable purpose of driving the intruders from his dominions, or of dying in the effort. And though he proved unsuccessful, yet the talents, the prowess and the address displayed by him in this bloody war, entitle him to a place among the first captains of past time (R. H., “King Philip, Or the Tradition of Manardan’s Rock,” The Western Monthly Magazine II [March 1834]: 140-44).
54Alger, Life of Edwin Forrest, 240.
55New York Morning Herald, December 28, 1837, quoted in Mason, “Politics of Metamora” 105.
56James Murdock, The Stage, or Recollections of Actors and Acting from an Experience of Fifty Years (Philadelphia: J. M. Stoddard & Company, 1880), 298-300.
57Quoted in Moses, The Fabulous Forrest, 332-33.
58Murdock, The Stage, 298-300.
59George E. Foster, Se-Quo-Yah, The American Cadmus and Modern Moses (Philadelphia, 1885); and Willard Walker, “Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary,” Ethnohistory 40 (1993): 70-94.
60[Jeremiah Evarts], Essays on the Present Crisis in the Condition of the American Indians (Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1829), 6.
61Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1. For review and analysis of this case see G. Edward White, The Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 1815-35 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1988), 703-40; and Priscilla Wald, “Terms of Assimilation: Legislating Subjectivity in the Emerging Nation,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 59-84.
62Child had written an Indian novel, Hobomok, in 1824, after reading Palfrey’s review of Yamoyden. On the origins of Hobomok see Carolyn L. Karcher’s Introduction to Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986). Child went on to do much more Indian reform work. See, for example, her An Appe
al for the Indians (New York, 1868). On Child’s place in the larger reform movement see Robert Winston Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indians (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971).
63Lydia Maria Child, The First Settlers of New England or Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansets, and Pokanokets (Boston, for the author by Monroe and Francis, 1829), 131, 155-56, 170.
64Sarah Savage, Life of Philip the Indian Chief (Salem, Mass., 1827), 39, 58.
65Edward Everett, An address delivered at Bloody Brook, in South Deerfield, September 30, 1835, in Commemoration of the fall of the Flower of Essex,’ at that spot, in King Philip’s War (Boston: Russell, Shattuck, & Williams, 1835), 8, 10-11. Everett’s opposition to Indian removal is best summarized in his essay “The Cherokee Case,” North American Review 33 (1831): 136-53.
66The Massachusetts Spy, October 12, 1831. My thanks to Kenneth Moynihan for pointing me to this event.
67Quoted in Dippie, Vanishing American, 16-17.
68Leslie J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 2:310-11. Or, as Charles Sprague proclaimed from Boston in 1825, “Here they warred; the echoing whoop, the bloody grapple, the defying death-song, all were here” (quoted in Dippie, Vanishing American, 14-15).
69Joseph Story, The Miscellaneous Writings, Literary, Critical, Juridical, and Political, of Joseph Story (Boston: James Munroe & Company, 1835), 78-79. Emphasis mine.
70John Marshall to Joseph Story, October 29, 1828, cited in White, The Marshall Court, 713-14.
71John Marshall, A History of the Colonies Planted by the English on the Continent of North America (Philadelphia, 1824), 166-67.
72[Evarts], Essays, 101.
73Andrew Jackson, Second Annual Address, December 6, 1830, in Papers of the Presidents 3:1084.
74Quoted in Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era, 19.
75Papers of the Presidents 3:1020.
76McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence, 436-37.
77Andrew Jackson, Second Annual Address, December 6, 1830.
78Everett, An address delivered at Bloody Brook, 8, 10-11.
79Stone, “Metamora,” 38-40.
80American Quarterly Review 8 (1830): 145.
81Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 88.
82Eastburn and Sands, Yamoyden, 4.
83John Greenleaf Whittier, “Metacom,” Ladies Magazine 3 (1830): 58.
84Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 126.
85Quoted in Moses, The Fabulous Forrest, 332-33.
86Dippie, Vanishing Indian, 71. Or, as Robert Berkhofer has argued, “No matter how inapplicable in this case, traditional Indian imagery rationalized the needs of the United States in the continued push of Native Americans from lands desired by White” (Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian, 160).
87Boston Morning Post, November 8, 1833. This account is briefly discussed in Bank, “Staging the ‘Native,’” 481.
88Boston Morning Post, November 8, 1833.
89Alger, Life of Edwin Forrest, 240.
90Ibid. Indian attendance was an enhancement of the performance; in a sense, they were a part of it, and could be a tremendous draw, helping fill the house with curious onlookers. In 1834, the Sauk chief Black Hawk even attended a one-night-only performance of a play about himself, Black Hawk, at the Bowery Theater in New York. But, just two years after his capture by Jackson’s forces, Black Hawk, the play, wasn’t the performance; Black Hawk, the man, was (Jones, Native Americans as Shown on the Stage, 86).
91Boston Morning Post, November 8, 1833.
92Story, Miscellaneous Writings, 79.
93Quoted in Hewitt, Theater USA, 107-8.
94Rourke, American Humor, 123.
95Quoted in Alger, Life of Edwin Forrest, 476-77.
96Papers of the Presidents 3:1020.
97On the Penobscot claims and controversies of 1833 see Paul Brodeur, Restitution: The Land Claims of the Mashpee, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Indians of New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 78. On the Mashpee see Brodeur, Restitution, 16-19; Donald M. Nielsen, “The Mashpee Indian Revolt of 1833,” NEQ 58 (1985): 400-420; Francis G. Hutchins, Mashpee: The Story of Cape Cod’s Indian Town (West Franklin, N.H.: Amarta Press, 1979), 95-112; Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 101-6; Barry O’Connell, ed., On Our Own Ground: The Writings of William Apess, A Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992).
98Massachusetts Senate Document 1833, Doc. 14:5; quoted in Laurie Weinstein, “We’re Still Living on Our Traditional Homeland: The Wampanoag Legacy in New England,” in Strategies for Survival: American Indians in the Eastern United States, ed. Frank W. Porter III (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 93.
99Boston Advocate, September 11, 1833, quoted in Apess, On Our Own Ground, 202. Hallett employed this rhetorical device on several other occasions as well: “We have had an overflow of sensibility in this quarter toward the Cherokees, and there is now an opportunity of showing to the world whether the people of Massachusetts can exercise more justice and less cupidity toward their own Indians than the Georgians have toward the Cherokees” (August 5, 1833, quoted in Apess, On Our Own Ground, 196).
100Apess, On Our Own Ground, 167.
101Quoted in Brodeur, Restitution, 18.
102Apess, On Our Own Ground, 177, 205.
103Nielsen, “The Mashpee Indian Revolt,” 416.
104Forrest performed Metamora at the Tremont on November 3, 1837 (Metamora Clippings File, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University), and a poster from the Boston Academy of Music in 1861 noted that Forrest was then giving “his 22nd Appearance in Boston in five years,” suggesting that he visited the city with great frequency (Edwin Forrest Poster Collection, Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University).
105Apess, Eulogy on King Philip (Boston, 1836), 6, 47. Karin M. Tiro has argued that Apess’s lecturing and publishing were intricately related to his Methodism (“Denominated ‘SAVAGE’: Methodism, Writing, and Identity in the Works of William Apess, A Pequot,” AQ 48 [1996]: 653-79).
106Apess, On Our Own Ground, 51.
107Apess, Eulogy, 6, 47, 14. Apess had also read Mary Rowlandson and Daniel Gookin (Tiro, “Denominated ‘SAVAGE,’” 664).
108Ibid.
109Whittier, “Metacom.”
110Stone, “Metamora,” 25.
111Tompson, New-England’s Crisis, 218.
112Apess, Eulogy, 27-28. See also Philip’s speeches in Yamoyden, 28-36, 39-44. A speech attributed to Philip by some historians (Bourne, Red King’s Rebellion, 107), is also fictitious. This speech, which ends with the oft-quoted line, “I will not die until I have no country,” is actually a rather liberal Revolutionary-era updating of John Easton’s conversation with Philip and his counselors in June 1675. The Eastern dialogue was first modernized (and embellished) by Theodore Foster (c. 1770) and later taken as literal fact by Samuel Greene Arnold (History of the State of Rhode Island [NY; 1859-60], 1:394-5).
113Apess, Eulogy, 48.
114Boston Daily Evening Transcript, January 6, 1836.
115John Brougham, Metamora; or, the Last of the Pollywogs (New York: Samuel French, n.d.), 17-18. See Moody, America Takes the Stage, 106-7, and Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 133-41.
116Brougham, Metamora, 7, 15-16. In one telling scene, Metamora’s wife (here called “Tapiokee”) sings to her infant,
O, slumber, my pappose! thy sire is not white;
And that injures your prospects a very dear sight;
For the hills, and the dales, and the valleys you see,
They all were purloined, my dear pappoose, from thee.
117George S. Boutwell, Address of Governor Boutwell at the dedication of the monument to the memory of Capt. Wadsworth, at Sudbury Mass., Nov. 23, 1852 (Boston?: s.n., 1852?), 1-2, 8.
118Nonetheless, inte
rest in King Philip’s War continued, albeit diminished. Several novels about the war were published in the latter half of the century, including Albert W. Aiken, Metamora, the Forest King (New York, 1870, 1885); Daniel Pierce Thompson, The Doomed Chief; or, Two Hundred Years Ago (Philadelphia, 1860) and G. H. Hollister, Mount Hope; or Philip, King of the Wampanoags, an Historical Romance (New York, 1851). Robert B. Caverly (“Poet and Historian”) also published a play about the war in 1884: King Philip (N.E.) An Historical Drama (Boston, 1884), which was followed a decade later by Alfred Antoline Furmar’s five-act Philip of Pokanoket (New York, 1894).
119Undated Washington, D.C., news clipping (c. 1867), Scrapbook, Edwin Forrest Clippings File, Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University.
120New York Times, October 31, 1877.
121Buffalo Bill himself even showed up at one performance (New York Times, January 4, 1887). On the decline of Indian plays more broadly see Kathleen A. Mulvey, “The Growth, Development, and Decline of the Popularity of American Indian Plays before the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1978).
122My thanks to Ed Gray for his assistance on this subject. See also Edward Gray, “Indian Language in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1820” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1996).
123Robert Caverly, King Philip. An Historical Drama (Boston: published by the author, 1884), Act I, Scene I; Act II, Scene III.
124For accounts of the capture of the “distinguished brave of the Seminole tribe” who was called “King Philip” during the Seminole wars see Niles National Register, August 4, 1838, and Army and Navy Chronicle, July 6, 1837.
125Ann McMullen (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, forthcoming).
126Narragansett Dawn 1 (November 1935): 172.
Epilogue • THE ROCK
1Edmund B. Delabarre, “The Inscribed Rocks of Narragansett Bay,” Rhode Island Historical Society Collections 13 (1920): 1-28. I thank Reinhard Battcher of the Bristol Historical Society for giving me flawless directions for finding the rock.
2Ibid., 9-21. There is considerable evidence that Algonquians in New England traditionally used rocks as sacred and memorial cites, sometimes called “Sacrifice Rocks” (Constance Crosby, “The Algonkian Spiritual Landscape,” in Atgonkians of New England: Past and Present, ed. Peter Benes [Boston: Boston University, 1993], 38-41).