Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave and the Cultural Construction of Race

Beth Fadeley

In the mid-nineteenth century, sculptor Hiram Powers sized original versions,4 Powers executed a series of busts became one of the most widely acclaimed American artists and three-quarter length replicas in marble and ceramic. of his generation. His meteoric rise was largely propelled by Even more affordable reproductions were widely distributed the critical and popular success of the Greek Slave, a marble in the form of Parian ware figurines, daguerreotypes, and statue that he began modeling in 1841 (Figure 1). The sculp- engraved prints. ture depicts a nude female figure with shackled wrists. The Art historians have duly scrutinized the Greek Slave for “official” narrative, outlined in exhibition pamphlets and its unprecedented popularity and especially for its remark- promotional materials, indicates that the scene is an episode able position as the first image of female nudity to be widely from the Greek War of Independence. Captured by the Turks, embraced by the American public. As other studies have the young prisoner is exposed for sale in a Constantinople demonstrated, Powers managed to temper much potential slave market. Yet despite her humiliating circumstances, she criticism by couching the work’s nudity in terms of Christian is a model of dignity and grace. Guarding her modesty with virtue and moral sentiment. His American agent Minor Kel- one hand, she steadies herself with the other, which rests logg devised an exhibition pamphlet for this very purpose: on a pillar adorned with discarded accoutrement: a fringed to guide viewers toward a “proper” interpretation of the garment, a locket, a cross, and a cap.1 work. The nearly twenty-page booklet includes selected com- When first displayed at a London gallery in 1845, the mentaries, laudatory poetry, and favorable reviews, which Greek Slave garnered widespread adulation in both the collectively established the statue’s historical and religious English and American press. Encouraged by initial praise framework. Straightforward as it was, the guide nevertheless for the work, Powers organized an ambitious exhibition failed to dictate the way that many viewers would come to tour in the United States. Between 1847 and 1848, more comprehend the image. Indeed, the Greek Slave resonated than one hundred thousand Americans flocked to see the with audiences in multiple and often contradictory ways, illustrious . While some expressed outrage over reflecting a complex cultural landscape that was undergoing the figure’s nudity, the Greek Slave was generally celebrated seismic shifts at midcentury; but even in a country sharply for its aesthetic perfection, sentimental appeal, and timely divided by the issue of slavery, Powers’s work was enthusiasti- subject. Subsequent presentations of the sculpture—in cally received by both Northern abolitionists and Southern London (1851), Paris (1855), and a second tour of American slaveholders. The key to the Greek Slave’s vast popularity was cities (between 1850 and 1857)—continued to draw vast its ability to deftly traverse this treacherous cultural terrain. crowds.2 Historians have justifiably linked the Greek Slave’s iconic It has been said that the Greek Slave was seen by more status to contemporary concerns about race, class, gender, people than any other work of American art in the nineteenth sexuality, and nationhood. All too often, the scholarship century.3 An inspiration for countless poems, commentaries, characterizes the artist and his audience of predominantly and other visual representations, the statue achieved an white, bourgeois Victorians as a homogeneous group. Thus, iconic status in Victorian American culture. Public demand in situating Powers’s statue within a historical account of for the image was so high, in fact, that in addition to six full- race and the human body, this essay attempts to go beyond

1 Powers’ Statue of the Greek Slave (New York: R. Craighead, 1847). and subsequently toured major American cities with an exhibition The booklet was compiled by Minor Kellogg, the sculptor’s friend and organized by the artist Minor Kellogg. Purchased by James Robb of manager of the Greek Slave’s American tour. New Orleans, this version is now in the collection of the in Washington, D.C. Sir Charles Coote of Dublin placed 2 Richard Wunder, Hiram Powers: Vermont Sculptor, 1805-1873 (New- an order for the third version, but when he failed to deliver payment, ark: University of Delaware Press, 1991). it was sent to the United States for a second exhibition tour. The fourth version, purchased by Lord Ward of England, is now lost, and the fifth, 3 Linda Hyman, “‘The Greek Slave’ by Hiram Powers: High Art as ordered by Prince Demidoff in 1851, is now owned by Yale University. Popular Culture,” Art Journal 35, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 216-223. The sixth and final version of The Greek Slave, completed in 1869 for Edwin W. Stoughton, is now privately owned but on permanent loan 4 The first sculpture was ordered by Captain John Grant of Devonshire, to the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. The sixth statue is the only England, in 1843. Completed in 1844, it is now part of a private version where the figure’s hands are bound by manacles instead of collection in Durham, England. The second was completed in 1846 chains. See Wunder, Hiram Powers. ATHANOR XXVIII BETH FADELEY

the dominant, predictable readings of the work and begins of American freedom as duplicitous. Encircling the statue’s to tease out the nuanced ways in which discourses of race base, a motif of whips and chains reiterates the violent reality intersected with those of politics, science, and religion. of American slavery, a condition glossed over by the Greek Scholars have long pointed to the antebellum period as Slave’s idyllic beauty and self-possession. a formative moment in the modern construction of race.5 This cartoon also demonstrates that contemporary audi- Historians have shown that before the nineteenth century, ences did not necessarily need to see a black body in order white racial prejudice was part and parcel of slavery. In the to conjure up racial meaning. In the mid-nineteenth century, minds of white Americans, black inferiority was primarily when American slavery permeated transatlantic discourses a condition of social and economic status, rather than skin of national and personal liberty—slavery and blackness color. Yet as the nineteenth century progressed, rationalized became inextricably linked, if not wholly synonymous. This ideologies of race began to materialize within a network of was especially true for visual imagery of the abolitionist scientific and cultural discourses. By midcentury, most white movement. Since the eighteenth century, abolitionists had Americans took for granted that persons of African descent forged a highly-visible presence in Anglo-American culture. were essentially different in mind and body. As a practical In their campaign to end slavery, they consistently deployed matter, racism provided justification for slavery in the South conventional signifiers of captivity and freedom—including and for the marginalization of free blacks elsewhere. whips and shackles, broken chains and liberty caps—as Despite its ubiquity, midcentury racism was neither a emblematic of black oppression. Abolitionist imagery was coherent nor a consistent phenomenon. As contemporary so powerful, in fact, that proslavery apologists had trouble responses to the Greek Slave indicate, Americans saw and creating images of the institution that would not be miscon- thought about race in a variety of ways. An image of slavery, strued as antislavery propaganda.8 the sculpture tapped into ongoing political debates related to When translated into the popular and widely intel- slavery and abolitionism. As a representation of the human ligible language of abolitionism, the white, Greek figure of form, it converged with shifting ideas about the human body, Power’s sculpture may be registered as a black, American and by extension, issues of race. slave. Indeed, the chains that bind her wrists and the liberty Even more broadly, the Greek Slave powerfully con- cap that rests by her side symbolize not the plight of histori- firmed preexisting ideas and beliefs. Martin Berger observes, cal prisoners, but rather, the more immediate enslavement “images do not persuade us to internalize values embedded of African-Americans. Although the Greek Slave’s body within them, so much as they confirm meanings for which epitomizes neoclassical—and demonstrably white—ideals the discourses and structures of our society have predisposed of beauty, in this ideological context, her whiteness is desta- us.”6 bilized by extracorporeal signs of blackness. In other words, In a recent study of the sculpture’s popular reception, some nineteenth-century viewers did not necessarily rely on one historian notes that many viewers on both sides of the physiognomy to determine racial identity, and by extension, Atlantic treated the statue as “a kind of lightning-rod for did not need to see a black body in order to identify the ideas and debates about American slavery.”7 For example, an Greek Slave as African-American.9 1851 cartoon published in Punch (Figure 3), a popular British Of course, most white viewers did not share the aboli- humor magazine, replaces the idealized white figure with tionists’ views and therefore failed to draw such comparisons a black female, identified in the title as “A Virginian Slave.” between the Greek Slave and her American counterparts. The image satirizes Powers’s sculpture for its sympathetic Many responses to the sculpture, and particularly those portrayal of a hypothetical white captive, while disavowing published in the slaveholding South, avoided the issue of the real plight of black slaves in the American South. The slavery entirely, focusing instead on the work’s historical American flag draped over an adjacent pillar and the inscrip- context, aesthetic beauty, or sensational nudity.10 In the same tion of the U.S. motto “E Pluribus Unum” impugn the ideal way that abolitionists revealed antislavery sentiment when

5 See, for example: George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Newsletter 114 (Fall 2008): 31. See also, Vivian M. Green, “Hiram Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817- Powers’s ‘Greek Slave:’ Emblem of Freedom,” American Art Journal 1914 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1971); Alexander 14, no. 4 (1982): 31-39. Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1990); 8 Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monu- David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the ment in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); and Bruce Dain, A Press, 1997). Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 9 Charmaine Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of 6 Martin Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture Minnesota Press, 2007), 86. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1. 10 Green, “Hiram Powers’s ‘Greek Slave,’” 31-39. 7 Sara Hackenberg, “Alien Image, Ideal Beauty: The Orientalist Vision of American Slavery in Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave,” Victorian

58 HIRAM POWERS’S GREEK SLAVE AND THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE

conflating the Greek Slave with blackness, those who were the family arrived in Cincinnati on May 5, 1818. Benjamin unable or unwilling to address the issue of slavery betrayed and Philader, two older brothers who were already living in their own investment in the privileges of whiteness. For the city, greeted the weary family and helped them settle many of these viewers, the Greek Slave tacitly confirmed the into a small farm outside of town. ideology of white supremacy by aligning the classical ideal After several years of arduous farm-work and extended with pure whiteness. illness, the young Hiram grew weary of rural life. In 1820, For instance, nineteenth-century racial theorists often he moved into the home of his brother Benjamin, a well- invoked images of classical sculpture to demonstrate the established lawyer and journalist in Cincinnati. Around this “natural” hierarchies of race. One example appears in Types time, Benjamin became involved in an increasingly active of Mankind, an 1854 text by prominent racial scientists Jo- Swedenborgian community in the city, and through his siah Nott and George Gliddon (Figure 4).11 In an emphatic connections, Hiram Powers tapped into a social network attempt to illustrate the biological gulf between white and that included prominent Swedenborgian educators, artists, black, an engraved bust of the Apollo Belvedere is juxtaposed and religious leaders.12 By 1834, when he left Cincinnati to with a caricatured black figure and a chimpanzee. While the establish his artistic career in Washington, D.C., Powers was a complexion and countenance of the black figure is exag- devout Swedenborgian. Even after relocating to Italy in 1837, geratedly rendered to resemble the beast below, the white Powers remained a steadfast follower of the religion. He was figure is shown as the epitome of classical male beauty and even influential in converting other expatriate artists and god-like perfection. In positing whiteness as an ideal human establishing an English-speaking congregation in Florence. quality and blackness as an animal trait, Nott and Gliddon’s Central to Swedenborgian theology is a theory of cor- illustration charts the brute logic of scientific ethnology: that respondences, which explains the mystical connections identity can be registered within and on the surface of the between heaven and earth, and more specifically, between human body, and moreover, that because whiteness is a the human mind, body, and spirit. According to this doctrine, marker of perfection, it must follow that blackness is a sign the human soul or “inner person” corresponds to the physical of animal-like degeneracy. body or “outer person,” with the mind serving as a conduit The images from Punch and Types of Mankind demon- between the two. Although the body reflects the character of strate how the Greek Slave, at once an image of slavery and the soul, Swedenborg emphasized that the correspondence an expression of classical taste, articulated contradictory ra- is merely imperfect: only the earliest humans possessed facial cial messages in the various contexts of abolitionism and sci- features so expressive of intellect and character that verbal entific ethnology. Yet, of the various, unexpected, and surely and written communication was superfluous. As the natural unintended interpretations of the Greek Slave, the artist’s world became infiltrated by evil, the human face lost much very own ideas about his sculpture may indeed be the most of its communicative ability.13 remarkable. Swedenborgianism, a Christian sect based on the As this theory demonstrates, Swedenborg rooted human writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, became a powerful influ- identity in the intangible mind and spirit, rather than the ence in Powers’s life and artistic practice as he came of age physical form. External characteristics and differences—in- in Cincinnati, , during the 1820s and 30s. The religion cluding skin color—were merely adaptations to the natural may have also shaped the way Powers thought about the hu- environment and therefore unrelated to identity. Thus, man body, race, and slavery. Thus, Swedenborgian theology nineteenth-century followers of Emanuel Swedenborg largely may shed new light on the racial meaning of the Greek Slave. resisted racial theories grounded in physiognomy. As one Born July 29, 1805, Powers grew up on a small family believer wrote in 1869, “Nature has not the least claim to farm near Woodstock, Vermont. Although Stephen and Sarah be a direct revelation of God, any more than the body has Powers raised their eight children in the Universalist tradi- to be a direct revelation of the soul.”14 tion, Powers never fully embraced his parents’ faith. When Swedenborg’s theory of correspondences is also central the Powers’ livelihood was devastated by famine in the fall to Hiram Powers’s ideas about art. In personal correspon- of 1817, the family headed west and settled near the center dence, the sculptor asserted that “the legitimate aim of art of Swedenborgian activity in the Midwest: Cincinnati, Ohio. should be spiritual and not animal,” and that “the nude statue After a long journey and a brief stopover in New York State, should be an unveiled soul.”15 By the artist’s own assessment,

11 Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 9. 13 Emanuel Swedenborg, The Universal Human and Soul-Body Interac- tion, ed. and trans. George F. Dole (New York: Paulist Press, 1984). 12 In the early 1820s, Benjamin Powers joined a small society that met once a month to present original papers on New Church doctrines. 14 Henry James, Sr., The Secret of Swedenborg (Boston: Fields, Osgood, In addition to Powers, the group’s membership was limited to Luman 1869), 122. Quoted in Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Watson, Milo G. Williams, and Alexander Kinmont. See Ophia D. Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of Smith, “Adam Hurdus and the Swedenborgians in Early Cincinnati,” North Carolina Press, 1997), 196. Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 53, no. 2 (1944): 106-34. 15 Hiram Powers to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 7 August 1853, Smith- sonian Institution. Quoted in Donald M. Reynolds, “The ‘Unveiled

59 ATHANOR XXVIII BETH FADELEY

his sculptural figures represent not physical bodies, but their world corresponds to love in the spiritual world.” Because heavenly counterparts: purer and more perfect spiritual be- dark-pigmentation is an adaptation to the sun’s heat, black- ings. To be sure, the Greek Slave, in its immaculate white ness corresponds to Africans’ physical proximity to the sun marble, idealized beauty, and religious symbolism, reflects and thus to God’s love. However, the writer emphatically Swedenborg’s characterization of the divine human spirit. emphasizes that “the correspondence…is with the use of the Several historians have diligently traced the influence of color of his skin and not with the color itself.” In other words, Swedenborg’s writings in Powers’s work. However, contribu- the African’s black body is not a legible register of inward tions made by nineteenth-century Swedenborgian thinkers character. Concealed by black skin, a more perfect spiritual are often overlooked. Until now, no one has linked Powers’s being dwells within the black body. As De Charms puts it: sculpture to an incredible, but inadequately examined, racial “the spirit of the good and wise African is white.”17 ideology cultivated within the artist’s very own religious com- When situated within the context of contemporary munity. Integrating Swedenborg’s theory of correspondences Swedenborgian ethnology, Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave may with contemporary racial discourses, nineteenth-century be evocative of an essentialized black spirit. In dominant Swedenborgian theologians arrived at a doctrine which readings of the work, the figure is often associated with held that blacks were uniquely endowed with the greatest typical traits of ideal white womanhood—piety, purity, and capacity for Christianity. submissiveness. When read from a midcentury Sweden- Between 1837 and 1839, Swedenborgian minister Al- borgian perspective, the figure may also be understood as exander Kinmont conducted a lecture series in Cincinnati a disembodied black spirit. Describing the Greek Slave in on the “Natural History of Man.” In his teachings, Kinmont 1869, Powers wrote: “It is not her person but her spirit that contrasts the white and black races, noting their innate dif- stands exposed….”18 ferences in mind and body. He does not agree, however, The meaning of race, however, cannot be found in the that such differences indicate black inferiority. Conceding human mind, body, or spirit. Rather than a natural fact, race the white supremacist conviction that blacks lacked “genius, is a cultural invention. In the nineteenth century, theories natural quickness, and…extreme aptitude to the arts,” he of race emerged within a body of scientific, political and goes on to praise their “sweet and lovely character,” “divine religious discourse. Yet, in its arbitrary divisions and sweep- benevolence,” and “light-heartedness which distinguishes ing generalizations, this cultural construction of race was the whole race.” Most notably, Kinmont asserts that Africans, ultimately untenable. Although Swedenborgians viewed rather than Caucasians, were the ideal Christians: “All the Africans as “natural Christians,” they were still unable to sweeter graces of the Christian religion appear almost too reconcile the problem of a black body with the romantic tropical, and tender plants, to grow in the soil of the Cauca- ideal of whiteness. As Karen Sánchez-Eppler asserts, “the sian mind.” In the theologian’s stereotypical assessment, the very effort to depict goodness in black involves the oblitera- black mind was an ideal nursery for the seeds of Christianity. tion of blackness.”19 When planted, Kinmont predicted that ideal Christian faith If Powers did, in fact, intend for the Greek Slave to arouse would “grow naturally and beautifully withal.”16 public sympathy for the American slave, he was compelled to Kinmont’s fellow church leader in Cincinnati, Richard do so by disavowing the black slave body. In the logic of nine- DeCharms, published a similar treatise in 1851. De Charms’s teenth-century romantic racialism, the only way to humanize argument, however, is deployed as overt condemnation of a black body is to erase its blackness. Only then would the American slavery. Invoking the theory of correspondences, injustice of slavery become apparent to white audiences. The he notes that black skin is merely an environmental ad- problem with romantic—and even idealistic—ideas about aptation to the climate of Africa, but it also represents a race is that they are nevertheless racial ideas. correspondence to spiritual genius. As De Charms explains, “Africa is peculiarly the land of heat; and heat in the natural University of South Carolina

Soul’: Hiram Powers’s Embodiment of the Ideal,” Art Bulletin 59, no. 18 As quoted in Green, “Hiram Powers’s ‘Greek Slave,’” 32. 3 (1977): 394. 19 Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of 16 Alexander Kinmont, Twelve Lectures on the Natural History of Man, Feminism and Abolitionism,” in The Culture of Sentiment, ed. Shirley and the Rise and Progress of Philosophy (Cincinnati: U. P. James, 1839), Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 102. 73-218.

17 Richard De Charms, Some Views on Freedom and Slavery in the Light of the New Jerusalem (Philadelphia: George Charles, 1851), 77.

60 HIRAM POWERS’S GREEK SLAVE AND THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE

Figure 1. Hiram Powers, Greek Slave, 1851 (fifth version), marble, 65 ¼ x 21 x 18 ¼ in., Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Olive Louise Dann Fund.

61 ATHANOR XXVIII BETH FADELEY

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Figure 2. R. Thew, The Greek Slave, engraving published in Cosmopolitan Art Journal vol. 2, 1858, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 62 HIRAM POWERS’S GREEK SLAVE AND THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE

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[above left and right] Figure 3. John Tenniel, The Virginian Slave: Intended as a Companion to Power’s “Greek Slave,” c. 1851, engraving published in Punch, or the London Charivari, January-June 1851, page 236, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

Figure 4. Engraving published in Types of Mankind by Josiah C. Nott and George , ' R. Gliddon, 1854, South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, South Carolina. 63