Stephen Foster and the Slavery Question

Abstract

Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published serially in 1851–52, was a cultural sensation. As Sarah Meer writes, “It was bought, discussed, imitated, and invoked on a scale hitherto unseen and previously unimaginable for a novel by an American woman, let alone a novel about slavery.”1 In the decade before the Civil War, and well beyond, Stephen Foster's music played a large role in this “Tom mania.” His sentimental minstrel songs, especially “Old Folks at Home,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Massa's in de Cold Ground,” and “Old Black Joe,” resemble some aspects of the story, which tells of an enslaved man torn from his family and sold down the river from Kentucky to the Deep South, where his enslaver dies before he gets around to freeing him and his next owner eventually beats him to death. Filled with pathos, the songs were heard by some listeners as resonating with the novel's humanizing portrayals of enslaved people. At a time when whites disputed the humanity of people of color and dehumanized them in popular-culture representations, some people even interpreted the songs’ portrayals as supporting abolitionism. Frederick Douglass, for example, suggested that, because “the finest feelings of human nature are expressed in them,” they could be leveraged to “awaken the sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root, grow and flourish.”2George W. Jamison's stage adaptation of the novel was one of dozens mounted in the 1850s. Running intermittently in New Orleans and at New York's Bowery Theatre, it included a rendition of Foster's “Old Folks at Home” that expressed the sadness felt by refugees who had escaped enslavement and were now separated from their loved ones. In other adaptations, Uncle Tom sang “Old Folks” after being torn from his family by enslavers, enriching the characterization of Tom as he experienced the horrors of enslavement.3 But in Jamison's version, “Old Folks” is performed as fugitives are shown living in miserable conditions in the North after being duped by abolitionists into fleeing their enslavers. The song's expression of “still longing for de old plantation” in this context conveys a decidedly proslavery message.Meer observes that ambiguity about enslavement in “Old Folks”—an ambiguity that is ubiquitous in Foster's minstrel songs—opened it up to various applications. On the song's nostalgia, she writes, “Old Folks” is crucially ambiguous about what precisely this . . . nostalgia is for. Is it (politically neutrally) for a place, time, and people; is it (an antislavery) longing for the family and home from which the singer has been cruelly parted; or is it a yearning for a return to the social relations of slavery itself? “Old Folks” was incorporated into Tom shows in such a way as to suggest all three. In different productions listeners were called upon to sympathize with a “black” character who variously missed home, mourned an involuntary removal, or made an idyll of slave life. The nostalgia of “Old Folks” readily became a political tool, but the song's politics were indeterminate in the song itself and mutable in its application.4Meer's analysis of proslavery, antislavery, and neutral uses of Foster's music during his lifetime raises questions about the composer. Like Foster's music, Stowe's novel contains ambiguities that allowed it to be exploited in various ways. But Stowe's rhetoric—both in the novel and outside—made her antislavery intentions clear. Foster's songs lack larger narrative context, and he never commented on political uses of his commercial songs. Were his intentions aligned with Stowe's?Starting in the 1930s, it was an accepted scholarly opinion that, as Fletcher Hodges Jr. put it, “Foster had no use for either the Abolition movement or Abolitionists.”5 But in 1979, Charles Hamm noted that Foster turned away from comic minstrelsy toward sentimentalism and nostalgia. He suggested that “there is evidence that events of the early 1850s had a profound effect on [Foster],” referring to the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin and the interpolation of his songs in adaptations of the novel. Hamm stopped short of suggesting that Foster's political views changed, and he certainly never asserted that Foster became an abolitionist. But he hinted at the possibility that Foster's perception of racial difference softened, quoting a letter that Foster wrote to Edwin P. Christy in 1852 to point out that the songwriter first focused his energies on writing minstrel songs that abandoned “trashy and really offensive words” before virtually withdrawing from minstrelsy by the mid-1850s.6Hamm influenced generations of musicologists who identified more ways in which Foster's music and its uses evolved, including the move away from derogatory cover art on his sheet music, the gradual removal of dialect, the songs’ support of Lincoln and the Union Army during the Civil War, the early drafts of lyrics for “My Old Kentucky Home” that reveal the song was inspired by Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the use of “Old Folks at Home” by antislavery activists.7 In some interpretations, this evidence is seen to reveal Foster's political evolution away from his family's conservative, Democratic politics. For Deane Root, for example, the 1852 letter to Christy is evidence that Foster embarked on a mission that “created a genre and attracted a large audience to a popular song literature that for the first time in American history suggested a humane intelligence and a measure of dignity in place of the prevailing cartoonish ridicule in minstrel portrayals of African Americans.”8 In support of this interpretation, scholars have pointed to progressive people in Foster's social circle. Foster was close friends with the abolitionist writer Charles Shiras. His marriage in 1850 to Jane McDowell linked him to Martin Delany, an African American who apprenticed in the 1830s under Jane's father, Andrew McDowell, and went on to help guide hundreds of refugees along the Underground Railroad. Delany was supported by Charles Avery, who was a preacher, businessman, philanthropist, ardent abolitionist, supporter of the Underground Railroad, and neighbor of the Fosters.This essay focuses on the contradictions that have been glossed over in research that places Foster and his music within narratives of American racial progress. Jennie Lightweis-Goff has argued that the narrative of Foster's political evolution is complicated by his return toward the end of his life to comic minstrel songs in dialect.9 Building on this work, this essay explores newly discovered and underexamined archival documents to interrogate the place of enslavement and partisan politics in Foster's daily life, positing that scholars’ focus on progress has led to an oversimplified view of how the composer's music became embedded in social movements. All evidence suggests that Foster remained a conservative Democrat opposed to nationwide abolition and Black equality. This essay demonstrates that he softened the caricatures and opened up the meanings of his songs in order to make them marketable across sectional and political divisions, not because he embarked on a social mission.Foster's campaign songs, his activities in support of political candidates, and his acquaintances’ remembrances demonstrate that he consistently supported the candidates and views of the Democratic Party. In the antebellum period, fissures emerged between the Democrats’ pro–free labor and proslavery wings. Attempting to maintain its unity, the party gradually adopted a compromise platform grounded in the controversial Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.10 These measures gave future states the right to choose to permit slavery—couched in terms of preserving the Constitution and its guarantee of states’ rights—and strengthened laws about recapturing people who had escaped bondage. The Fugitive Slave Act, which was a component of the compromise, permitted slave catchers to cross into free states to retrieve fugitives, compelled citizens of free states to assist, and empowered federal marshals and judges to oversee the process. Where, exactly, Foster came down on the Democrats’ wide ideological spectrum is impossible to decipher from the existing evidence. But he can be understood as harboring ambiguous views centered on these compromises and opposing national abolition. He most definitely wanted to preserve the Union and leave the Constitution unchanged. Ironically, when Lincoln co-opted this rhetoric in the first phase of the Civil War, Foster's ideals briefly came into alignment with those of the Republican president.Throughout this essay, a distinction emerges between Foster's politically ambiguous commercial music and his highly partisan noncommercial songs. It may have been the Democratic Party's approach to compromise that informed his nonpartisan approach to the market. Like his Democratic Party, which deferred to states to choose their destiny regarding enslavement, Foster wrote commercial songs that deferred to performers and listeners to decide their political messages. In other words, Foster's partisanship informed his ability to write music that would be taken up by his political opponents. Of course, it was taken up by his political allies as well. But following the composer's death, his friend Robert Peebles Nevin, a Republican, inaugurated an approach to memorializing him that ignored his partisanship and situated his music within whiggish histories of slavery and race. As will be shown, Nevin knew firsthand about Foster's conservative political views and had even been a marshal in a Republican parade that Foster lampooned in “The Abolition Show.” But, writing for the Atlantic after Foster's death, he ignored the composer's political and social views and paraphrased Frederick Douglass, writing that Foster's music “dealt, in its simplicity, with universal sympathies, and taught us all to feel with the slaves the lowly joys and sorrows it celebrated.”11 This kind of “history by the victors” continues to conceal the true roots of Foster's music into the present day.In all, this article suggests a middle road between the post–Hamm view of Foster's “mission” and the older view of Foster as having no time for abolitionists. Abolitionists comprised only a small number of northerners,12 and Foster considered them his political opponents. But he also counted some among his closest companions, and Foster, his publishers, and abolitionists most definitely had use for each other. Along with people on the other side of the slavery question, abolitionists bought, played, and sang Foster's music.Karen Cox notes that, from Foster's day through the early twentieth century, “the most successful songs” about the South “were written and published by northerners and were extremely popular with northern audiences, which shared the composers’ nostalgia for the South and sentimentalized its race relations” by fantasizing about “masters” and “happy slaves” in a “preindustrial” society.13 Cox overlooks that this northern construction coincided not just with northern industrialization but with the moment that enslavement was disappearing from the northern landscape. Scholars have long assumed that Foster had little firsthand knowledge of enslavement and knew few Black people, which has functioned to distance the composer from enslavement and racism.14 But neither assumption is true. Surrounded by enslaved people, Foster was raised in a family that viewed enslaving humans as a symbol of high status. He also grew up listening to sentimental and nostalgic songs by Thomas Moore and Henry Russell and attending performances of Ohio River–traveling minstrels.15 It is not surprising, then, that in the 1840s, long before Uncle Tom's Cabin and the events of the early 1850s that allegedly pushed him toward sentimental minstrelsy, a young Foster began writing songs that sentimentalized his personal experience of race relations in the age of Pennsylvania's gradual abolition. Foster's minstrel songs are not just about enslavement in the South. They also concern the vanishing of the institution in the North.The Pittsburgh to which Foster's father, William Barclay Foster Sr., moved in 1796 was little more than a trading post inhabited by a small band of colonizers on what was then the western edge of the United States. Pittsburgh was full of opportunities for ambitious men of Scots-Irish descent like William Sr.16 By the time of his death in 1855, it had transformed into a major center of industry, an emblem of free labor in the industrial North. A genteel professional class had emerged, and workers labored on the wharves and rivers and in the coal mines, iron foundries, and glass and cotton factories. As a destination for people of color who escaped enslavement and free African Americans, the city's Black population grew proportionate to overall growth through the first half of the nineteenth century, leading to a diverse community of low-wage laborers, business leaders, and social activists.There was also a steadily decreasing number of enslaved people as Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition Act phased out slavery.17 When the law took effect in 1780, people who were enslaved remained enslaved for life, and the children of enslaved mothers were born into involuntary twenty-eight year terms of enslavement. Term-enslaved people were bought, sold, traded, and gifted, and their lives were hardly different from their mothers’ for at least the duration of their terms, and many times long after.18 The Gradual Abolition Act caused the number of people enslaved in Pennsylvania to dramatically decrease during Foster's childhood and young adulthood in the 1830s and 1840s.Upon his arrival in the city, William Sr. became a merchant and joined what John Tasker Howard refers to as the “pioneer aristocracy of Pittsburgh.”19 It was likely on a business trip to Philadelphia that he met Eliza Clayland Tomlinson, whom he married in 1807. In a memoir written later in life to pass down to her descendants, Eliza reveals that enslaved people were a significant part of the Fosters’ lives from the moment they arrived in Pittsburgh following their wedding. Enslaved people rarely play a significant role in Eliza's recollections; instead, they serve as symbols of the family's elite status in a bygone era. In one story, George Ross—son of Senator James Ross—rides home to Pittsburgh while “his black servant, who had the care of his portmanteau, rode ten or fifteen paces in the rear upon a horse the exact counterpart of the one [George] mounted himself.” In another episode William Wilkins and a “Mr. Bertram” ride their horses to the estate of Daniel Beltzhoover, where “a well dressed black servant appeared and took hold of the bridles of the horses while the gentlemen dismounted.”20 Both of these scenes took place in the 1810s, when these “servants” were almost certainly enslaved for life or term-enslaved people.From about 1815 to about 1829 the Fosters lived in a home they called the “White Cottage” (see Figure 1), where Stephen was born in 1826 on the Fourth of July. The home was located just outside Pittsburgh in Lawrenceville, which William Sr. had “founded” in 1814 when he purchased land to sell in plots to families and individuals. Eliza's memoir reveals that by 1821 at least one term-enslaved person and one servant who was likely from Ireland worked at the White Cottage.21 Although Eliza fictionalizes people's names, borrowing stock names for Black characters from minstrelsy and literature, her son Morrison provides a key that reveals that the term-enslaved person called “Dinah” was Olivia Pise. In the memoir, Olivia's presence helps establish a romanticized scene. Writing in the third person, Eliza writes, The gray evening was closing fast and the soft dews were descending upon the green turf that surrounded the [Foster] Cottage.On the eastern side [Olivia] was milking the prize cow that had been purchased some weeks previously from Mr. [Beltzhoover]. Mrs. [Foster] sat upon the side portico, with a child in her arms, occasionally turning her eyes toward the gate which opened on the road. “[Olivia],” said she, “keep your milk vessels well scalded and sunned, or the cool spring house will fail to keep it sweet now, even though it is so well shaded by the large oak.”“Yes, ma'am,” said [Olivia], “I tries to keep ’m as nice as I can.”22Eliza gives Olivia a final instruction—“As soon as you strain your milk, send in the tea”—and Olivia exits. The memoir refers to Olivia only once more. William Sr. reads a letter from their daughter Charlotte, away at school, who writes of how she imagines herself back at the Cottage: “I see [Olivia] passing along with her pails of frothing milk, on her way to the spring house, and Ellen and I run before her to see her strain and set it away, and she orders us out fearing the damp will give us colds.”23 In Eliza's remembrances, Olivia functions as little more than an object in the romanticized landscape.According to Morrison, Olivia was “a mulatto bound-girl” and “the illegitimate daughter of a West India Frenchman, who taught dancing to the upper circles of Pittsburgh society.”24 Howard identified her father as the man listed in the 1815 Pittsburgh city directory as “Henry G. Pius, dancing academy.”25 Since the Gradual Abolition Act was crafted to pass the status of hereditary term slavery from the mother, it is likely that Pius was one of many Pennsylvania men who raped enslaved women to produce more unfree laborers. He likely sold Olivia to the Fosters. She appears to have worked for the family until they moved out of the White Cottage around 1829, at which point she disappears from the historical record.Eliza describes another servant, “Jack Devlin,” as a “woodman.” Since she refers to him with a first and last name and portrays his speech without dialect, it can be assumed that he was of European descent, perhaps one of the thousands of Irish immigrants who arrived after the War of 1812. Since white indentured servitude was rare in the 1800s, he likely worked for low wages. Elsewhere Eliza mentions a “French servant” she calls “Blanchard,” who works as a doorman and, like Devlin, does not speak in dialect.26 Other documents reveal that a white woman worked for the Fosters and that her son, Thomas Hunter, was bound to the family in exchange for them raising him.27 In all, evidence exists of five people who served the family just prior to and, in some cases, following Stephen's birth, representing the range of available unpaid and low-wage labor.William Sr.’s land investments failed to be profitable. The Bank of the United States foreclosed on his properties in 1826 and forced the Fosters to leave the White Cottage by 1829. This solidified the family's allegiance to Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party, which had launched a full-scale attack on the Bank of the United States and aligned itself with enslavement and expansionism. Following their eviction, the family separated and moved several times as William Sr. struggled to find steady work. When in need, however, the family was supported by the eldest child, William Jr., who worked as a canal surveyor and later became a prominent canal engineer, served as a Pennsylvania canal commissioner, and finished his career as vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. With his assistance, the Fosters never declined in social stature or political connections.28 In April of 1833, Stephen's sister Ann Eliza married Edward Buchanan, whose brother was James Buchanan, the Democratic lawmaker and future diplomat and president from Pennsylvania. James Buchanan later helped secure government positions for William Jr., William Sr., and Henry Baldwin Foster, the second eldest of the Foster siblings.The Fosters’ friend Sarah Lowrey Collins also assisted the family in this period. In an 1834 letter, William Sr. wrote to William Jr. that “Mrs. Collins made your ma a present of an excellent coloured girl a few days ago, who has upwards of three years to serve. So much saved for girls hire.” This brief reference to this girl or young woman, whose name may have been Kitty,29 indicates that she was enslaved for a term. Perhaps she was born in Pennsylvania to an enslaved mother and was to become free when she turned twenty-eight. Or maybe she was born in Maryland, where she may have been enslaved by Collins's relatives. Like James Buchanan and many other Pennsylvanians, Collins may have exploited a loophole in the Gradual Abolition Act that allowed enslaved people to be imported into Pennsylvania, where they were “manumitted” and designated as servants.30 All that is certain is that the Fosters, in need of money, were gifted a term-enslaved person who performed unpaid labor for the family, and William Sr. was pleased that he did not have to pay her.William Sr.’s fortunes improved in the 1840s. In 1841 the family moved into a house owned by William Jr. in Allegheny City, across the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh, and the following year William Sr. began a two-term tenure as mayor. On April 9, 1842, he wrote to his daughter Henrietta, “The coloured woman Catharine Russell still keeps house for us but she goes home every night.”31 At some point she moved in, for the 1850 US census lists “Catharine P. Roussel” as living with the family. It also identifies her place of birth as Ireland (indicating that to the Fosters “coloured” could also describe Irish immigrants) and lists Margaret McGowan, also born in Ireland, as residing with the family.32 At this point, Morrison and Stephen lived in the house too, and Morrison's financial records indicate that the young women were paid $1.25 per week and John Duval, whom he specifies as a person of color, “commenced 17th March [1851] at 10$ per month.”33 There are multiple references to servants in the family papers from 1855. Eliza's obituary mentions that “the faithful servants that looked upon her as a mother, rather than a mistress, will sigh for another home like theirs with her.”34 Later, as William Sr.’s health was failing, Stephen wrote to Henrietta that he preferred not to have nurses in the house, but he praised his servants Margaret and Biddy.35 These documents reveal that, as enslavement gradually receded and as William Sr.’s fortunes improved, the family transitioned to paid servants. In other words, Stephen personally experienced gradual abolition as his family replaced term-enslaved people with low-wage workers in his homes.In 1842, about five years after the last known term-enslaved person concluded her work for the family, Eliza and Henry visited a distant cousin, Liza Skinner, at her plantation on Maryland's Eastern Shore. They shared a common ancestor in the Reverend James Clayland, who settled in Maryland around 1670, about twenty years after Edward Lloyd had established the first plantation there. Subsequent generations of Claylands built their own plantations centered around Lloyd's, and thousands of enslaved people worked in the community. Much has been written about these plantations, but perhaps the strongest words about the violent rule of the Lloyds and their white neighbors—including the Skinners—come from the pen of Frederick Douglass: Nearly all the plantations or farms in the vicinity of the “home plantation” of Col. Lloyd, belong to him; and those which do not, are owned by personal friends of his, as deeply interested in maintaining the slave system, in all its rigor, as Col. Lloyd himself. Some of his neighbors are said to be even more stringent than he. The Skinners, the Peakers, the Tilgmans, the Lockermans, and the Gipsons, are in the same boat; being slaveholding neighbors, they may have strengthened each other in their iron rule. They are on intimate terms, and their interests and tastes are identical.36Douglass grew up on the Lloyd plantation before being transferred to a Baltimore family, from whom he escaped in 1838.Eliza wrote romantically of the Eastern Shore to her daughter Henrietta. She sentimentalized her crossing of the Chesapeake Bay from Talbot County, where “the bright sun reflected his rayes upon the elegant mansions along the extensive Eastern shore of Maryland, the land of my ancestors whose bodies are moulderd with the dust of their fields, and whose tombs compose the porticos of their palaces.” She was proud of her familial connection to Liza Skinner, whose stature she measured by her possessions, including the people she enslaved. “Mrs. Skinner is a widow, her Mother was a Miss Clayland,” she boasted to her daughter. “She owns one Thousand acres of land, two hundred and fifty negroes, and stock immeasurable, and considerable money in safe banks.”37Like his mother, Henry was impressed with the world of the Eastern Shore. Writing to William Jr., he expressed his attraction to the Skinner daughters, whom he described as “worth about $10,000 apiece”—the equivalent of $324,000 in 2019 dollars using the CPI to adjust for inflation, or $7,310,000 in 2019 when considered relative to per capita GDP. He noted, “Salina and I got up quite a flirtation and there is no knowing when it may end as both of us manifested pretty strong symtoms [sic] of attachment for each other.”38 The relationship ended quickly. But the letters shed light on Eliza's and Henry's attitudes. In the waning days of Pennsylvania slavery, Eliza marveled at the numbers of people her relatives enslaved, and Henry was seduced by the wealth generated from enslavement and the possibility of being inducted into the world of the Eastern Shore through marriage.According to Morrison, Stephen wrote his first sentimental minstrel song, “Uncle Ned,” in 1845.39 Like his mother's writings, Foster's song expresses attraction to and fascination with enslaved bodies and sentimentalizes the disappearance of enslavement. Like Eliza's portrayal of Olivia in her memoir, the song objectifies its title character. The first verse describes him as having had “no wool on de top ob his head,” and verse three indicates, His fingers where long like de cane in de brake,He had no eyes for to see;He had no teeth for to eat de corn cakeSo he had to let de corn cake be.Also like Olivia and the other enslaved people about whom his mother wrote, Uncle Ned is a symbol of a bygone era, for, as Foster states at the beginning of the song, “He's dead long ago, long ago!” Like Moore's “The Last Rose of Summer” and Russell's “Woodman! Spare that Tree!” Foster's song is filled with nostalgia for a vanishing age. But instead of Moore's rose and Russell's tree, Foster's point of reference for nostalgia is the deceased slave character Ned. His enslaved companions sing, “Den lay down de shubble and de hoe / Hang up de fiddle and de bow: / No more hard work for poor Old Ned / He's gone whar de good [N-word] go.” Five years before the Fugitive Slave Act and six years before the first installment of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the nineteen-year-old Foster had the ingredients for his sentimental minstrel songs that would come to speak to a diverse array of listeners. The sentimental portrayal of enslavement, accentuated by the musical setting, could be heard by some listeners as dignifying the song's characters or as expressing a politically neutral nostalgia for a bygone era. The slave characters do not explicitly state their dissatisfaction with enslavement or desire to be free, allowing some listeners to understand them within the “happy slave” archetype common to the minstrel stage. Heard in that way, the song represents nostalgia for slavery itself.Since enslavement disappeared in the North amid a shift to industrialization and free labor, all Foster's songs that metaphorically deal with change and loss are entangled with the shift away from slavery. Susan Key writes, “For Foster, as with many of his contemporaries, the people and objects of nostalgic contemplation were often found in a natural landscape . . . filled with birds, soft breezes, and young women gathering flowers. No doubt this represented an idealized version of the lost rural roots of many Americans.”40 The character in “Farewell! Old Cottage” painfully says goodbye to a country home, a symbol of vanishing agrarianism. It is difficult to read Foster's lyrics without thinking of the White Cottage and Olivia: Farewell! old cottage,You and I must part:I leave your faithful shelterWith a poor breaking heart.The character nostalgically recalls scenes from childhood but does not mention servants or enslaved people, so it would be inappropriate to conclude that the song portrays nostalgia for enslavement. But surely many of Foster's contemporaries in the North would have imagined someone like Olivia as part of the scene, part of what they were saying farewell to.In many of Foster's songs, deceased young women represent this loss. In “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” the singer remembers the title character in natural settings and characterizes her with nature metaphors: she trots alongside streams, sings with birds, and smiles like the “day-dawn.” “Gentle Annie” describes its subject as “like a flower,” and the singer remembers how they “roamed and loved mid the bowers.” In “The Voice of By Gone Days,” the singing persona remembers his “early love,” who was “radiant as the light” and “pure as dews of night.” “Laura Lee” recalls its subject as “like a flitting beam” and possessing a “sunny smile.” The singer wonders, “When will we roam the plain Joyous and free, / Never to part again, Sweet Laura Lee?” The women described in these songs represent the lost, idyllic world of the old cottage.Although the cover art on the sheet music and lack of dialect has caused these songs to be generally understood to be about white women, there is rarely anything in the lyrics or music that explicitly identifies the race of the characters. These songs could be understood to be sung by Black pe