A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art 9780823298594

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A TRU E AM ERICAN

A True American WI LLIAM WALCUTT, NATIVI S M, AN D N I N ETE E NTH-CE NTU RY ART

Wendy Jean Katz

fordham university press  New York 2022

Copyright © 2022 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-­party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Katz, Wendy Jean, author. Title: A true American : William Walcutt, nativism, and nineteenth-century art / Wendy Jean Katz. Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021054448 | ISBN 9780823298570 (paperback) | ISBN 9780823298563 (hardback) | ISBN 9780823298587 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Walcutt, William, 1819–1882—Criticism and interpretation. | Art and society—United States—History—19th century. | Nativism—Case studies. Classification: LCC N6537.W234 K38 2022 | DDC 709.2—dc23/eng/20211206 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054448 Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22   5 4 3 2 1 First edition

Contents

List of Illustrations  vii Preface: Why William Walcutt?  xi Introduction: Fraternalism and True American Iconography 1

1 A Native-­Born Artist 23



2 A Cooperative Model for Art 41



3 Native Americans and the West 54



4 Fairies, Allegory, and the Spiritualists 77



5 The Young Americans at Home and Abroad 108



6 More Lasting Monuments 135

Conclusion: Walcutt’s Revival 151 Acknowledgments 163 Notes 165 Index 207

v

Illustrations

Introduction

1 N. Currier, The United American, c. 1849 2 Sarony & Co., Uncle Sam’s Youngest Son: Citizen Know Nothing, 1854; Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1860 3 George P. Morris, Few Days, or The United Americans, 1854 4 John McRae after Frederick A. Chapman, Perils of Our Forefathers, 1850 5 John Chester Buttre after Tompkins H. Matteson, “Spirit of 76,” Wide-­Awake Gift, 1855 6 Grant Wood, Daughters of Revolution, 1932 7 Henry Brueckner, “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum, 1856 8 Thomas Butler Gunn, “Tableaux of American History,” Lantern, 1852 9 “Columbus Aroused by the Cry of ‘Land,’ ” Vanity Fair, 1860

2 6 7 10 13 17 18 19 20

Chapter 1

10 William Howland after Thomas R. Whitney, frontispiece, Republic, 1851 11 Lossing & Barrett, “Kissing the Pope’s Toe,” Republic, 1851 12 Thure de Thulstrup, “The Ministerial Reception,” Scribner’s Popular History of the United States, 1897 13 J. H. Byram after William Walcutt, “Monument to Young Tindale,” America’s Own, 1850 vii

24 25 27 29

viii ILLUSTRATIONS

14 15 16 17

America’s Own mastheads, 1849–54 32 Photograph of the ten Walcutt children, n.d. 34 William Walcutt, Eagle Coffee House, 1840(?) 35 William Walcutt, Thomas D. Jones, and Caleb C. Wright, Henry Clay Medal, 1852 37 18 William Walcutt, Improvement in Sofa-­Bedsteads, Patented March 26, 1872 39 Chapter 2

19 Johann Hasenclever, Studio Scene, 1836 20 Charles Blauvelt, A German Immigrant Inquiring His Way, 1855

46 48

Chapter 3

21 William Walcutt, “Joel Wetsel,” American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum, 1856 22 Jean-­François Millet, Mazeppa Americain, 1851 23 Karl Bodmer, Simon Butler, The American Mazeppa, 1851 2 4 Eugène Delacroix, Mazeppa on the Dying Horse, 1824 25 Horace Vernet, Mazeppa and the Wolves, 1826 26 William Walcutt, Simon Kenton’s Death-­Ride, 1859 27 William Walcutt, “Jardin des Plantes,” Bell Smith Abroad, 1854 28 Tompkins H. Matteson, “The Last of Their Race,” American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum, 1856 29 William Walcutt, Turkey Shooting, 1855 30 Charles Deas, Turkey Shooting, by 1838 31 William Walcutt, Deerslayer at the Shooting Match, circa 1850 32 John W. Orr, after William Walcutt, frontispiece, Campfires of the Red Men, 1855 33 Tompkins H. Matteson, The Turkey Shoot, 1857

55 58 58 60 60 62 63 65 66 68 70 74 75

Chapter 4

34 William N. Dunnel after William Walcutt, frontispiece, Proverbial Philosophy, 1849 35 William Walcutt, cover, The Lilac at the Door, 1857 36 William N. Dunnel after William Walcutt, Portrait of Carlos D. Stuart, 1849 37 “Duganne’s “Iron Man” and “Here’s More of Them Furreners,” Yankee Notions, 1852

79 81 83 84

ILLUSTRATIONS

38 Augustus Morand, William Walcutt, Sculptor, c. 1860–68 39 John Cole Hagen, Snow Scene (Labor’s End), 1847 40 John McRae after Frederick A. Chapman, “Opening Scene,” and William Walcutt, “Closing Scene,” Foot-­Prints of Truth; Or, Voice of Humanity, 1853 41 John McRae after Frederick A. Chapman, “Infidelity” and “Fanaticism,” Foot-­Prints of Truth; Or, Voice of Humanity, 1853 4 2 Whitney & Jocelyn after Jacob Dallas, illustrations, Ariel, 1855 43 Frontispiece, Fairy Tales of Many Nations, 1850; Frontispiece, Vala, 1851 4 4 William N. Dunnel after James Cafferty, “The Picture of the Lord,” and William Walcutt?, “Dom Pedro Commits a Double Murder,” Fairy Tales of Many Nations, 1850 45 Thomas P. Rossiter, Studio Reception, Paris, 1841 46 John McRae after Christopher P. Cranch, “Graphic Muse,” Hagen, Foot-­Prints of Truth; Or, Voice of Humanity, 1853; John W. Orr after Thomas P. Rossiter, “Glory Forever to Art,” Vala, 1851 47 John W. Orr after William Walcutt, illustrations, Vala, 1851 48 William Walcutt, illustration, Vala, 1851 49 Bobbett and Edmonds after William Walcutt, Vala, 1851 50 William Howland after Thomas W. Whitley, illustration, Vala, 1851 51 Thomas Hicks, illustration, Vala, 1851

ix

86 87

89 90 93 95

96 99

101 102 103 104 105 106

Chapter 5

52 John W. Orr after F. O. C. Darley, “The Thanksgiving Dinner,” Chanticleer, 1853 53 John W. Orr after William Walcutt, “Mopsey Putting the Pies in the Oven,” Chanticleer, 1853 54 John W. Orr after Tompkins H. Matteson, “Wilfred Montressor,” Golden Rule, 1846 55 Frontispiece, Chanticleer, 1853; “This is the Cock that Crowed,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1859 56 Thomas W. Strong, frontispiece, Young America, 1856 57 John McLenan, “Art and Artists,” Young America, 1856 58 Adolphe Yvon, The Genius of America, 1858 59 William Walcutt, “Initial A,” Bell Smith Abroad, 1854 60 William Walcutt, illustration, Bell Smith Abroad, 1854; William Walcutt, “Young Frenchman,” 1852–54

109 110 111 113 115 116 119 120 121

x ILLUSTRATIONS

61 William Walcutt, Toppling the Statue of George III at Bowling Green, New York, 1854 122 62 William Walcutt, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III at Bowling Green, 1857 123 63 Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, New York City, 1852–53 124 64 William Walcutt, Molly Pitcher at the Battle 128 of Monmouth, 1845/49 65 Currier & Ives after Jacob Dallas, The Women of ’76: Molly Pitcher, The Heroine of Monmouth, before 1872; John McRae after Tompkins H. Matteson, “Elizabeth Zane,” 129 American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum, 1856 66 “The Happiest Day of My Life,” Odd-­Fellows’ Offering for 1853; V. Balch after Junius Brutus Stearns, “Marriage of Washington,” Odd-­Fellows Offering for 1851 131 Chapter 6

67 William N. Dunnel, The Engraving of the Washington Monument after Walcutt’s Design, 1848 68 Nathaniel Currier, View of the Great Conflagration at New York, ca. 1845 69 Benson Lossing, “Perry’s Statue,” Pictorial Field-­Book of the War of 1812, 1868; “Public Square at Cleveland,” Harper’s Weekly, 1860 70 William Dressler, “Perry’s Victory March,” 1860 71 William Walcutt, William Elmore Ide Monument, 1880; William Walcutt, Myrilla, 1870 72 William Walcutt, Musadora, 1868

136 138

141 145 149 150

Conclusion

73 John W. Orr after William Ross Wallace, The Washington Memorial, 1860 74 The Unveiling of the Statue of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, 1928 75 William Walcutt, Portrait of Peter Rawson Taft, 1859

153 157 161

Preface Why William Walcutt?

At age twenty-­nine, a small-­town Ohio artist named William Walcutt moved to New York City.1 He was one of a flood of artists pouring into Manhattan from around the country, attracted not only by the city’s art market but by its booming publishing industry and the opportunities for illustrating books and magazines. He arrived in 1847, in time to be swept up in the city’s fervor for democratic movements at home and abroad. Young America, as this support for the expansion of suffrage, especially for the uprisings in Europe, was branded, was an enthusiasm that crossed party, ethnic, and religious lines. It was a mood enhanced by New York’s increasingly cosmopolitan character. More than three million immigrants came from Europe to New York between 1846 and 1855, a period when U.S. territorial expansion also meant, controversially, expanding republican government (and slavery) to new peoples. Walcutt joined the native-­ born and foreign writers, politicians, and artists who wanted to liberate the oppressed in the Americas, Italy, France, Ireland, Austria, Hungary, and Poland. Walcutt’s art in these years, however, heroized the past. The colonial Americans who fought the British or the Indians, who won their independence and extended their domain, were models for the citizens of the present. But they became more than that. His effort to revive the past in order to topple modern tyrants was undermined when anti-­immigrant forces co-­opted his working-­ class message, embedding nativism in the period’s patriotic images of liberty. Nativism, which in this period consisted primarily of hostility to Catholics, especially Irish Catholic immigrants, was able to take such a stranglehold not only on politics (the Know-­Nothing Party reached its peak in terms of membership and electoral success in 1855) but on art and culture in this period, precisely because it was an age of reform. The spirit of the age was xi

xii PREFACE

progress, as the newspapers proclaimed, and America, the model republic, was in the vanguard of mechanical, industrial, and social change. But the same movements that defined that progress for contemporaries—movements toward improving the human condition, antislavery movements, pro-­ democracy movements, temperance movements, even land reform—got much of their impetus from Protestant evangelicals. These same thinkers, often joined by more secular revolutionaries, almost always consigned the Catholic Church and its hierarchies to a repressive past, part and parcel of the feudal, monarchical, and exploitative systems that they were trying to end.2 And it was this idea of an America free from the tyranny of kings and popes that reformers shared with the men who were reconstituting the Native American Party as, first, a benevolent fraternal order designed to protect the young men who were its members, and then as the American, or Know-­Nothing, Party. The Brotherhood of the Union, for example, founded by a popular writer and Odd Fellow who dabbled in nativism, was dedicated to protecting labor and land reform.3 Reformers and nativist organizers, even though they were not by any means always one and the same, often wielded the same rhetoric of anti-­Romanism and aimed it at skilled native-­born artisans, including artists, who were bearing the brunt of industrialization, and who themselves were seeking ways to reform it. Their appeal to these men to protect the nation was often successful. As one of the great historians of nativism put it, “Whether the nativist was a workingman or a Protestant evangelist, a southern conservative or a northern reformer, he stood for a certain kind of nationalism . . . that some influence originating abroad threatened the very life of the nation from within.” Opposition to an internal minority, which again in this period was mostly Irish Catholic immigrants, was expressed as opposition to their foreign, so un-­ American, character.4 In this book I focus on one artist, William Walcutt, as a case study of this milieu. Walcutt was not a member of any of the nativist political parties, but he contributed significantly to publications by leading “true American” politicians and writers. Because of his status as someone who was not himself an ideologue, but only what might be called “nativist adjacent,” his artwork testifies to how pervasive the equation of American liberty with Protestant beliefs about citizenship really was. Most books that concentrate on an individual artist aim to validate the artist’s genius and originality. My goal in this study is not to insert Walcutt into an art historical canon by validating his exceptionalism, even though on aesthetic grounds he absolutely deserves a second look. He was well trained as a painter and sculptor—his accomplishments included winning a medal in Paris—and his historical compositions

PREFACE

xiii

were carefully researched. In his own day, his outline illustrations were called masterly, and his public sculpture was said to be the best in the country. Instead, the book illuminates how Walcutt, like even the most canonical artists, was economically and socially grounded in certain forms of art production. Print culture in particular was an important source of revenue for most artists, and, at the same time, it was an important nativist outlet. Nativism arose not just from religious prejudice, but from economic dislocations and fears of waning political influence on the part of the middling classes, who did not often buy oil paintings. Engravers and printers were the kind of white Protestant artisans who felt pressure from industrialization’s erosion of their independence and who were attracted to reform movements and Native American parties. They joined cross-­class brotherhoods like the Odd Fellows and early iterations of the Know-­Nothings, and they disseminated its ideas in myriad illustrated publications, including sheet music, gift books, newspapers, and novels. Walcutt, who had lifelong ties to artisan culture, was involved not only in illustration for fraternal associations but in organizing cooperative or benevolent associations in the art world, endeavors that promoted “true Americanism” in the fine arts as well. To the extent then that Walcutt’s profile was not exceptional but the norm for nineteenth-­century artists, his art and career show how this “norm” was infused with nativist ideas of true Americanism.5 Many scholars in fact have recognized the specifically Protestant and millennialist worldview of American artists and patrons of the period, as well as the influence of nationalist sentiment. 6 But what is less often acknowledged is that at mid-­century, that worldview contained a good dose of anti-­ Catholicism. The cultural nationalism that envisioned a distinctively egalitarian American art and culture that would spread across the globe often coincided with the belief that only certain groups of people were really American. As critics, patrons, and artists promoted native American artists and encouraged the creation of artworks that by expressing certain behaviors or conflicts appeared uniquely American, they often chose the same images as anti-­Catholic and nativist groups did. The most patriotic art of the nineteenth century, the art that spoke most strongly about egalitarian democracy, was often the art most colored by exclusionary beliefs about citizenship.7 But narratives of American art that cover the antebellum period tend to downplay the role of nativism, just as the Know-­Nothing Party, seemingly so short-­lived, disappeared into the Republican mainstream after the Civil War with few legislative successes to its name. For example, in Hudson River School landscape painting, despite or even because of the supposed universality of the sublime experience of nature that

xiv PREFACE

its pictures of the wilderness captured, it’s not often noted that that experience was designed to exclude certain people.8 Views of the Hudson River and the Catskills in New York, first described by Leatherstocking in James Fenimore Cooper’s Pioneers, were then visualized by painter Thomas Cole in the 1820s. Cole’s patron, the owner of the Catskill Mountain House hotel, developed mountain trails to encourage tourists to stay longer in order to ascend to proper viewing points. These views from the hotel porch and trails, as well as pictures of the hotel itself, were subsequently painted by almost every major landscape artist. Such views were literally as well as metaphorically (in the sense of compositions constructed in the mode of a pilgrimage to high places) designed for the Elect.9 The Mountain House, in order to exclude Jews and Catholics, held mandatory Sunday services for hotel guests.10 In considering, then, the celebration of these tourist views of the Catskills as a distinctive American school of art, as regularly centerpieces of the exhibitions of New York’s National Academy of Design, one might note that Samuel F. B. Morse was president of the National Academy of Design from 1826 to 1845. Morse was also a leader of the nativist political party that emerged in New York in the 1830s, and when he was again made president of the Academy in 1861 (followed by his student, Daniel Huntington, an artist known for his religious paintings, in 1862), he was still organizing nativist political societies.11 For the Hudson River School, the American republic was nature’s nation, which underscored its democratic character. But ideas about the republic’s origins in nature, whether that nature was envisioned in the Catskills or Walcutt’s “western home,” often drew from a well closed to strangers. Walcutt and the wide range of artists, musicians, and writers in his circle who contributed to nativist media, precisely because most of them were not members of nativist political parties, demonstrate how this Protestant idealism—the belief that the future of the U.S. was as a Protestant nation—was inextricably part of how considerable numbers of nineteenth-­century viewers and makers understood American art. The very diversity of Walcutt’s practice as an artist, from sculptural monuments to fairy illustrations, to frontiersmen, to battle pictures, only underscores how nativist sentiments pervaded forms seemingly remote from the subject of immigration or religion. In reconstructing these connections between Walcutt and the beliefs of his friends and patrons, I was aided by the survival of a number of his records. Walcutt was a published poet and a writer, and his contributions to the nativist journal the Republic offer a wealth of material. Equally useful were his notebooks, which contain records of pictures painted or planned, and his several sketchbooks, which, like his wife’s memory book, included portraits and mementos of friends and family. His many friendships with politicians and writers, from

PREFACE

xv

humorist Artemus Ward to ambassador Donn Piatt to Know-­Nothing Congressman Thomas R. Whitney, meant that they, too, recorded his activities.12 Together, these documents describe a milieu in which spiritualists, evangelical ministers, poets, politicians, satirists, engravers, and painters—both men and women—advocated for antislavery, temperance, and workingmen’s rights, as well as nativism. The career of William Walcutt, then, tying together as it does Ohio and New York, Democrats and Republicans, working-­class artisans and wealthy politicians, nativism and international solidarity, even painting and sculpture, offers a way to rethink nineteenth-­century American art. Each chapter of this book traces how Walcutt’s diverse output—fairy art, “Western” heroes, public sculpture, revolutionary-­era paintings, book illustration—was supported by circles hostile to “foreign” influence, whether for religious or political reasons or both. The introduction describes a nativist iconography: how nativist groups like the Order of United Americans adopted visual cues—youthful ardor, brotherhood, Stars and Stripes—that evoked not just patriotism, but an ethic of mutualism. This ethic stemmed from artisan culture’s resistance to capitalist individualism, and it manifested itself in fraternal orders like the Odd Fellows. It was co-­opted by the Know-­Nothings to support their positions favoring Compromise (with slavery and the South) for the Union and restricted citizenship, and it emerged in historical pictures by Walcutt and others that demonstrated that the “spirit of ’76” was one of Protestant brotherhood. Chapter 1 offers an overview of Walcutt’s biography with the goal of explaining what Walcutt and the nativists had in common: a lineage that stretched to the Mayflower, an artisanal upbringing, and a family commitment to Protestant reforms. Chapter 2 considers how those values on native birth, artisan modes of cooperation, and reform were expressed in the groups that Walcutt founded in New York, the cooperative American Artists Association and the New York Sketch Club, both of which offered members social and trade benefits and fostered a fraternal culture. Though these were not political societies, in the very process of resisting capitalist art markets (trying to establish alternatives to them), the artists involved aligned themselves with the nativist wing of Young America and its belief that the white Protestant working class (not foreigners or merchants) would create an egalitarian democracy.13 Subsequent chapters turn to specific genres of art. In Chapter 3, I tackle Walcutt’s pictures of the “West,” which heroized pioneers, whether legendary but real ones like Simon Kenton or fictional ones like Cooper’s Leatherstocking. In constructing his natural nobleman, a man shaped by Western nature and who because of that is kin to his rivals, American Indians, Walcutt drew on working-­class and French Realist consciousness of the value of the

xvi PREFACE

ordinary man.14 But his pictures also corresponded to nativist sympathy for policies of assimilating their fellow “native” Americans and their simultaneous effort to sideline slavery because of its threat to the Union. In Chapter 4, I point out that despite the influence of Realism, Walcutt and several Sketch Club artists produced “fantastic” art, elaborate allegories with devils and angels, fairies and nature spirits. Behind these lay a transcendentalist or idealist belief in the spirit—the spirit of the age was a constant theme for believers in progress—that was aligned with Protestant humanitarian reform, and more generally the belief of nativists in ethnic or cultural essentialism. Chapter 5 appraises the influence of Young America, a movement that supported literary and artistic demands for a national school of art and in politics voiced a critique of the Catholic Church’s alliance with tyrannical governments as part of supporting international democratic revolts. The men and women who espoused the ideas of Young America, a number of whom joined Walcutt’s Sketch Club, were often supportive of Irish immigrants, even as they characterized the church and the pope as repressive. Indeed, most of them were Democrats, the party that provided the Irish with a powerful political base. Their cultural nationalism was not nativist, then, in the sense that they shared the goal of disenfranchising immigrants, but their hostility to foreign cultural imports extended to the influence of the pope on susceptible American citizens, along with the promotion of an alternate, more democratically American, style, and this influenced the energetic comic illustrations of nativist themes by Walcutt and the Sketch Club artists. Though not comic—their seriousness moved Walcutt toward a style of more classical restraint—Walcutt’s historical paintings of the American Revolution were among the subjects advocated for by both Young America and nativists. Few of these paintings have been located today, but among them are his best-­ known works—even at the time, one newspaper called his battle scenes especially effective. In them, he foregrounds the action of white and some Black men and women, acting in unison. Walcutt’s creation of a unified people as a symbol for the U.S. was not just a response to the imminent Civil War, though. It inserted the elements of nationality as envisioned by antislavery nativists into the Republican creed. In Chapter 6 and the Conclusion, I focus on the artwork that made Walcutt nationally known in his own day: his monument to War of 1812 hero Oliver Perry in Cleveland, Ohio. It demonstrates how Walcutt’s style, while drawing on nativist rhetoric about Anglo-­American greatness, was able to win over both Democrats and Republicans on the eve of the Civil War. The Conclusion considers the fate of the same statue during the Colonial Revival of the early twentieth century, when Progressive-­era elites turned to the

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xvii

colonial past to reassert their cultural control. The 1928 reproduction of ­Walcutt’s statue of Commodore Perry for the Capitol of Rhode Island was a sign of the recurrence of nativism in the twentieth century. But Walcutt’s “fiery” portrait style continued to carry Young America’s message of expanded rights for ordinary people. Rhode Island, a bastion of “old stock” rule, was transitioning to less restricted voting requirements, which for the first time permitted its Catholic majority to have a voice. This book tries to show that even such ordinary, accepted aspects of nineteenth-­century art—the seeming ubiquitous worship of George Washington, the popularity of paintings of eighteenth-­century revolutionary events—when examined through the lens of Walcutt’s career, emerge as intertwined with nativist politics. His experience especially points to the nativist strain detectable in commercial art and engraving in the nineteenth century. This was not just the product of popular taste but, as the benevolent fraternities that turned into the Know-­Nothing Party desired, of a union of artisan culture with more elite patronage. Walcutt’s work and practice provide insight into this underexplored aspect of antebellum visual culture.

A TRU E AM ERICAN

Introduction Fraternalism and True American Iconography

A Currier lithograph, published not long after William Walcutt arrived in New York, points to the intertwining of nativism with common American ideals (fig. 1). The artist shows a gentlemanly and youthful United American, a member of an anti-­immigrant fraternal order active in New York. There were several such orders just in New York, especially during years when nativist political parties were relatively quiescent. New York’s Know-­Nothing Party (in the 1840s, the American Republican Party) of the 1850s would mostly emerge from this Order of United Americans. In the sketch, the man’s youth and genteel economic status may express wishful thinking on the part of the nativists, or even a kind of counter-­propaganda. Most organized, political nativism of the period was composed of older, wealthy Whigs. These conservative “old fogies,” or “silver gray” Whigs (nicknames themselves suggesting elderliness), disapproved of how the head of the Whig Party in New York, William Seward, courted immigrants, Catholics, and abolitionists.1 However, these disaffected Whigs, mostly professionals and merchants, did try to attract younger, white, Protestant, native-­born artisans to a shared, cross-­class identity. They valued skilled labor as a significant voting bloc, but also as a sign that their version of Americanism had broad appeal to the masses. It probably did. Many historians argue that native-­born “mechanics” felt threatened by the Irish and German immigrants who arrived in the 1840s and ’50s. Wages were undermined by their influx, and as taxpayers who had to struggle to stay out of poverty themselves, skilled workers were also wary of being taxed to support the often desperately poor immigrants.2 So they joined fraternities like the Order of United Americans and, later, political parties, that promised protection. The Order of United

1

2 Introduction

Figure 1. Nathaniel Currier, The United American, c. 1849, lithograph. Published by N. Currier. Public domain; image provided by the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Nathaniel Currier also published campaign material for Millard Fillmore’s Know-Nothing presidential candidacy of 1856. Louis Maurer, a German immigrant who also worked for ­engraver Thomas W. Strong (in 1851), another occasional publisher of nativist materials, did some of the firm’s anti-Catholic cartoons.

Introduction

3

Americans had an age limit of eighteen to fifty-­five, but most members were under thirty-­five. Currier’s portrait might thus be considered aspirational in suggesting that a member of the Order of United Americans was not only youthful, but prosperous, with a desk job and kid gloves. If the effect of his checkered pants and frock coat amid all the stars and stripes is to suggest a beardless Uncle Sam, well, the United Americans often called themselves Sam, or Sam’s youngest son. They practiced a demonstrative patriotism, as here with the eagle desk, banner (the Order of the Star Spangled Banner was a nativist fraternal order, too), and Revolutionary War picture on the wall. But Young Sam—Young Sam was the name of a Know-­Nothing periodical—is slender, with long hair, no beard, and big, dreamy eyes.3 This quality, of romantic ardor for country, for something greater than himself, speaks not just to the idealizations of art, but to the ostensible reason for being a member of the Orders of United Americans, or Star Spangled Banner, or United American Mechanics. These were benevolent or friendly fraternities, which meant they pooled resources to pay benefits to members and their families in times of need. The premise was mutual aid to one’s brothers. As such, they were nonpartisan or even anti-­partisan, a stance that actually helped a third party like the Know-­Nothings colonize them; the Know-­Nothings presented themselves as an alternative to the existing parties. Like other popular fraternities of the day, the appeal of the United Americans was to men in the cities, often with young families, who were distant from kin networks of support and had not accumulated much savings. The Freemasons are the best known today of the fraternal orders, but they were less dominant in the years before the Civil War. Organized in the eighteenth century as an expression of Enlightenment rationalism and search for universal truths, their lodges had tended in the U.S. to attract older, more socially prestigious and economically prosperous members. George Washington was famously a Mason, and so was Thomas Cole, and Masonic imagery is interwoven with much American art.4 But expanding nineteenth-­century orders like the Odd Fellows provided younger and less socially established members not just discretionary payments, but with sick benefits and widow and orphan benefits. Nativist orders imitated their successful model. Native-­born white Protestant women working as seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, bookbinders, and other urban jobs were as vulnerable as men to “unfair competition” from immigrants. One “Female Native American Association,” like the male nativist organizations, accordingly provided burial and other benefits.5 These associations thus acted as substitutes for actual families, and in their literature

4 Introduction

and rituals they accordingly appealed not to young men and women’s self-­ interest, but to mutuality, to earnest sentiments about religion and country, and to love for beautiful maidens and true comrades. The picture on the wall in the United American lithograph, John Trumbull’s Battle of Bunker’s Hill, encapsulates this feeling. It shows an American general dying in the midst of the fray, with his brave artisanal (as per their blouses and humble bare feet) soldiers embracing and defending him, and even a British officer (a nod to shared Anglo-­American tradition) gallantly assisting in his protection. Two Americans, a white lieutenant and his African American servant, enact the spectator’s gaze, looking back at the patriotic martyr in horror and pity.6 Their pairing reminds the spectator that the world of the Revolution was a world of personal loyalties, in which loyalty to the new nation was a matter of feeling. That feeling could include antislavery sentiments as a form of chivalric benevolence toward inferiors.7 Part of the Know-­Nothings’ appeal to young men, at least in the North, where it was strongest, was passionate devotion to preserving the Union that General Warren had died for, and that Union included African Americans, if not necessarily as equals. Like the Masons and the Odd Fellows, nativist fraternities excluded African Americans as members, but at times nativists valorized African Americans as being because of their birth superior to and more American than immigrant voters. Daniel Ullmann, an Episcopalian Yale graduate, temperance advocate, conservative Whig, and key politician for the New York Know-­ Nothings, became an officer for the first Black regiment in New York.8 Walcutt was involved with publications produced by two nativist fraternal orders in New York, the United American Mechanics and the Order of United Americans, which both limited membership to native-­born men. Though there are distinctions—as the names suggest, the mechanics were more oriented toward the working-­class and trades unions—the orders shared a basic ideology that was also expressed in American (Know-­Nothing) Party platforms restricting immigrant voting and naturalization. Such platforms did not specify religion, but these reforms were nonetheless aimed at Catholics, as other nativist-­backed laws like those enacted to preserve the Sabbath (not allowing any business or travel on Sundays) and to read the Protestant Bible in public schools indicate. Because this book is not a study of nativism per se, but of nativism’s influence on art, it concentrates not on the differences within nativism but on the common threads that tied the various groups together, and that found their way into art even outside their circles.9 Whether discussing the American Republican Party and the Native American Party of the 1840s or the American Party and nativist fraternities like the Order of United Americans in the 1850s, I am referring to the same political and

Introduction

5

cultural agenda: a Union that was a national brotherhood of Anglo-­Saxon Protestants. Know-­Nothing politicians, eager to secure that Union, duly steered clear of threats to it like antislavery or even free soil, which aimed to ban slavery from newly acquired western territories. Yet disapproval of slavery lay behind the eventual shift of most Know-­Nothings into the Republican Party well before the Civil War. One Know-­Nothing gang, the Wide Awakes, even became a paramilitary branch of the Republicans, and Kentucky poet and Sketch Club member William Ross Wallace published “Old Abe’s Address to the Wide Awakes,” urging them on to new fields of action (cf. fig. 2).10 This connection was something that Democrats pointed out when trying to tar the Republicans, who mostly rejected nativist legislation, with hostility to immigrants. In 1860 the Cleveland Plain Dealer, one of the most widely read Democratic papers and a supporter of Walcutt, published a caricature of the Wide Awakes designed to warn immigrants away from the new party, by suggesting it had been infiltrated by the nativists. A kind of travesty of the romantic United American, the large-­eyed Wide Awake looks demonic or at least quite sinister in his black cape and hat. The Republican militants would adopt more military garb (fig. 2). There was some hypocrisy to this, as the Plain Dealer had its own tinge of nativism. It was bitter about “freethinking” German immigrants supporting Abraham Lincoln instead of Stephen Douglas, the Democratic candidate for president. These German radicals, the Plain Dealer warned, echoing nativist fears about Catholic immigrants eroding Protestant dominance, also wanted to get rid of public prayer and state-­sponsored Thanksgiving and turn the republic into a near-­socialist democracy. Americanus, a Know-­Nothing, wrote angrily to the Plain Dealer after one Republican election victory to argue that the German radicals should not be allowed to vote—only the native born, the grandsons of the men of 1776, those who don’t try to innovate away from founding American principles (principles presumably including slavery) and religion, should be permitted.11 But reminding Irish immigrants, a crucial Democratic constituency, of the nativist contingent of the Republicans came in handy, too. The white felt Wide Awake hat “of peculiar shape” appeared more debonair and less like horns in an 1854 lithograph, “Uncle Sam’s Youngest Son: Citizen Know-­Nothing,” in which the youthful, dreamy True American is framed by the flag and eagle (fig. 2). As in the earlier Currier print (this one was published by a New York art and print dealer), he is not attached to any particular cause, other than the Union. The various nativist groups, like the benevolent fraternities and most white Northerners (and perhaps Southerners,

6 Introduction

Figure 2. Left: Sarony & Co., Uncle Sam’s Youngest Son: Citizen Know Nothing, 1854, lithograph. Published by Williams, Stevens, Williams & Company, an art gallery and print dealer at 353 Broadway. Public domain; image provided by the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Right: Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 8, 1860. Public domain; image provided by author.

too), were wary of any politicians who were openly willing to break up the constitutional Union over slavery. Lincoln was in fact attractive to them in this regard as a less radical alternative to William Seward, who was in any case seen as a sympathizer with immigrants. But whether in 1854 or 1849, in these relatively inexpensive lithographs, the wide-­eyed and wide-­awake Young Sam didn’t just wrap himself in the flag. He looked at—or stood in front of, saw himself produced by—the heroism of the revolutionary past. His ancestors died for his freedom and for the Union, and he was bound by their sacrifice to maintain it intact. The popular poet George P. Morris, a conservative Democrat beloved by the Plain Dealer, described this in a stirring song he wrote for the Know-­ Nothings in 1854 (fig. 3): “A subtle foe has plotted long / But we will show that

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7

Figure 3. George P. Morris, Few Days, or The United Americans, 1854. Written for the Campbell Minstrels. Published by Faulds, Stone & Morse, Louisville, Kentucky. Scotsman David P. Faulds also owned a piano store. Public domain; image provided by the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, Johns Hopkins University.

we are strong / For we are join’d both heart and hand / We soon shall free our Native land.” The chorus, “in a few days,” is a summons to action against Catholicism, with the “subtle” foe summoning up stereotypes of Jesuit casuistry. And in the next verse Morris emphasizes that the U.S., that “Native land,” is “ours,” because it belongs to those Americans whose fathers died to guard it. Liberty’s cause is sacred—an idea that ties religion to nation—and that cause joins men by heart and hand, by feeling, into a brotherhood. Banded together as native-­born citizens, they can, in emulation of their founding fathers, fight to keep the nation free from what Morris calls Alien rule. This is not foreign military conquest, so much as the Catholic vote, which threatens to put tyrants (like the pope) in charge of American institutions. That an entirely mainstream lyricist like Morris would write a Know-­ Nothing anthem demonstrates the pervasiveness and commercial viability of Know-­Nothing ideas among the electorate: in 1854, Daniel Ullmann, the nativist candidate for governor of New York, got a quarter of all the votes cast, and more than half of the Congressmen elected that year were nativist. In 1855, the numbers were even higher.12

8 Introduction

Morris today is mostly forgotten, but he published influential magazines and newspapers in New York for three decades.13 His sentimental patriotism and democratic belief in brotherhood made his poetry widely reproduced, particularly by newspapers put out by benevolent fraternities, but also more generally in conservative or so-­called “national” (inclusive of the South) Democratic papers that put preserving the Constitution and the Union ahead of ending slavery. A portrait of Morris, for example, appeared with a profile of him in a cheap, dollar-­a-­year magazine, edited by Charles Holden, a bookseller who died at age twenty-­three in the California gold fields. Holden published poetry not only by Morris, but by the equally rousing nativist poets A. J. H. Duganne and William Ross Wallace, both of whom would be involved with Walcutt’s Sketch Club. Holden had worked at Morris’s $5 Mirror and his penny Evening Mirror, as well as at the penny Sun, an expansionist, Democratic paper begun by printers—skilled artisans—and a paper that in its early years had an anti-­Catholic streak. Holden’s, like the Sun and Evening Mirror, looked kindly on Walcutt, and possibly one of Walcutt’s paintings was, albeit circuitously, connected to Holden. One of Holden’s other papers, the Island City, was edited by a writer whose reminiscences of the toppling of a statue of King George III in New York would be the subject of a Walcutt picture in 1854.14 Walcutt, in choosing that subject, may not have seen those particular reminiscences, but the point still remains that he and other artists who turned to revolutionary-­era history shared concerns about defining American citizenship—its “origins”—with nativist writers. This is equally evident in their joint publishing history: artists, engravers, authors, booksellers, and publishers cooperated on literary and political ventures. Holden promoted the work of his friend, landscape artist and editor Thomas Bangs Thorpe, who with Frederick Saunders would write a Know-­Nothing tract, Voice to America, in 1855, published by Edward Walker, who also produced annual Odd Fellow anthologies with contributions from Saunders and Walcutt. Thorpe heroized “backwoodsmen,” a subject Walcutt tackled in those contributions. Publisher Edward Walker was also responsible for Odd Fellow contributor Benson Lossing’s Seventeen Hundred and Seventy-­Six (subtitled A History of the Anglo-­ Americans).15 This overlapping is not coincidence, but shared ideology: Walker employed engraver Lossing on an anti-­Catholic book, History of Romanism, whose author, minister John Dowling, called Lossing’s sketches illustrations of fact, and Dowling’s daughter wrote on religious art for Walker’s American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum.16 Walcutt’s friend, poet Carlos D. Stuart, an editor at the Sun and the Evening Mirror, was a regular contributor with Walcutt and Lossing to the United Americans’ house organ, the Republic, as well as

Introduction

9

to Walker’s Odd Fellow annuals. Both Stuart and Walcutt were praised by Holden’s Dollar Magazine and of course by the Republic, the Sun, and the Evening Mirror. Shared concerns about how to best encourage American art similarly animated their art criticism. For example, like Morris, Charles Holden regularly covered art news. In a review of a book Walcutt illustrated, he argued that giving engravers and illustrators work—as he did in his own newspaper— would do more to encourage original American art than any art union or academy, organizations that presumably would be bound to European Old Master tradition. So, too, did C. D. Stuart claim, in the nativist organ the Republic, that a school of American art would best be served by avoiding academies.17 Holden was thinking of the influential American Art-­Union in New York, a corporation that staked its claim to serve the public on the basis of its encouragement of a native school of art, and Stuart probably of the National Academy of Design, which limited its membership (though technically it included engravers) to the fine arts. Their arguments point to what some may have seen as the elite biases of both organizations: artists working as illustrators found better support among printers and engravers—fellow skilled artisans—than they did among the patrons of the fine arts. Frank Leslie (British émigré Henry Carter), for example, was a skilled wood engraver who employed twenty engravers in his eponymous magazine as well as many illustrators.18 In part for that reason, the art of these painters/illustrators and the opinions of their supporters in the press like Holden and Stuart have not been much studied, except sometimes in analysis of representations of George Washington or surveys of historical painting.19 Even in those cases, scholars do not always note the connections to nativism of the various themes or of the people involved in their production. For example, Walcutt’s sometime collaborator on illustrated books artist, Frederick A. Chapman, set his 1850 painting the Perils of Our Forefathers among the Puritans of Connecticut, Chapman’s home state (fig. 4). It shows one of Oliver Cromwell’s generals, a man who helped that Protestant leader kill an English king (a king who had a Catholic wife), turning up to defend the townsfolk— gathered in their church—from an Indian attack. Almost all the elements— the heroic Puritans whose Protestant faith is key to their salvation, the older man who leads a band of youths in wide-­brimmed hats, the beautiful young women provocatively at their feet, the anti-­t yranny message (no kings!)—fit neatly within nativist rhetoric. Chapman would continue doing themes with nativist resonance after the war, including pictures of Betsy Ross and the ritual of Thanksgiving, a distinctively New England (and thus Protestant) custom, for Harper’s Weekly. Harper’s publishing house, a firm of four brothers

10 Introduction

Figure 4. John McRae after Frederick A. Chapman, Perils of our Forefathers, 1859, engraving. Public domain; image provided by the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Chapman’s original painting, c. 1850, is at Forbes Library, Northampton, Massachusetts.

that invested heavily in illustrated books, also produced the first nativist mayor of New York when James Harper, Odd Fellow and organizer of the American Republican Party, was elected in 1844. Flag worship, evident in the lithographs promoting youthful United Americans and in the later promotion of Betsy Ross, was a significant part of the almost exaggerated patriotism of the Know-­Nothings. It was explicit in the name of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (whose members were also known as the Sires of ’76), and in the rhetoric of poets like C. D. Stuart, writing in the Republic about the flag “of the stripes and the stars.” Walcutt’s own research on the “striped flag” traced its creation to Boston in 1776, to its appearance as what he understood as the first symbol of the united colonies.20 This underscores one important antebellum connotation of the flag. For Walcutt and his colleagues, the Stars and Stripes in its “grand” design was pro-­Unionist, “national” in the same way that political parties like the “national” Democrats included the slave-­holding South. The strength of this

Introduction

11

sentiment is evident in how those who still advocated for compromise with the South after the break-­up of the Know-­Nothings ended up, like orator Edward Everett (known for his tributes to George Washington), in the Constitutional Union Party rather than among the Republicans. So too did nativists endow Thanksgiving with a particular meaning: though the holiday was theoretically nonsectarian, Jewish groups in New York found it necessary to reproach Whig governors for combining church and state in Thanksgiving declarations that spoke a strictly Protestant language. Periodicals like the Republic featured stories of New England (thus implicitly Protestant) Thanksgivings. Walcutt would illustrate an early Thanksgiving-­themed novel set in New England by Cornelius Mathews, an editor of Holden’s Dollar Magazine, a promoter of native American art, and like Stuart, an honorary member of Walcutt’s Sketch Club. The treasurer of the American Bible Union perhaps inevitably named a Walcutt picture of a Christmas turkey shoot the “Thanksgiving turkey shoot,” as that was the more Protestant of the two holidays.21 Chapman’s 1871 illustration of “Thanksgiving at a New England Farmhouse,” in Harper’s Weekly, in drawing on this tradition, offers a rebuttal to Thomas Nast’s astonishingly inclusive “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner” in the same Harper’s Weekly just two years earlier, which gives everyone a seat at the table of universal suffrage.22 Yet both artists equate the holiday with the nation, and in so doing, stress the nation’s dominant Protestant character. Walcutt practiced art in Ohio before coming to New York, but many of the artists with whom he competed as a historical painter and collaborated with as an illustrator were from New England. Chapman studied with a fellow Connecticut artist, the failed history painter and successful inventor Samuel F. B. Morse. Morse was a well-­known figure in New York, a professor at the University of the City of New York, and the painter of a celebrated portrait of the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette for New York City. But Morse was also an early architect of organized or political nativism in New York; he published anti-­Romanist treatises in his brothers’ religious newspaper, the New York Observer, and ran for mayor under a nativist party banner in 1836 and 1841. Even his personal acquaintance with Lafayette was turned to nativist ends during those years. According to a Catholic journal trying to debunk the story, Morse in 1837 was responsible for the story of the alleged warning given to Washington by the French general about the danger of the destruction of the new republic by Catholic priests. Another of Morse’s students, Presbyterian Daniel Huntington, a student at Yale (which Morse had also attended), also went on to do historical and allegorical paintings that New York’s Catholic press characterized as

12 Introduction

distinctly anti-­Catholic. The Protestant Tribune said they were suited for “native Americans.”23 From Morse, Chapman undoubtedly imbibed the idea of the importance of patriotic historical narratives to great American art. Morse must have also communicated to his students the difficulty in finding patrons for his desired type of historical painting. His proposal to paint the Mayflower Compact for the Capitol in Washington, a scene that identified the Pilgrims as founders of a Christian theocracy in the New World, was turned down by Congress.24 Chapman’s historical paintings, like Huntington’s, were instead tied to the commercial engraving market, whose audience overlapped with that for the popular illustrated papers. Chapman, like other artists and engravers such as Benson Lossing, also illustrated for the American Tract Society, one of several nondenominational evangelical Protestant societies (the American Bible Society, the American Home Missionary Society, the American Sunday School Union) that issued illustrated bibles and other moralizing literature. As the word “American” in their names indicates, these societies also had a nativist streak, hostile to the “spiritual despotism” of Catholicism (often traced back to the English Civil War) as dangerous to American institutions and so were opposed to allowing recent immigrants to vote.25 Perils of our Forefathers itself was published as a print in 1859 by Scotsman John C. McRae, a frequent issuer of patriotic subjects, including one depicting New York’s Sons of Liberty toppling the statue of King George, again suggesting that the fervor for ordinary citizens uniting to bring down tyrants was broadly popular even as it conveyed a nativist reminder about who those citizens were. McRae also regularly engraved for the Odd Fellows’ publications and for the Union magazine, whose art editor, Tompkins Matteson, likewise aimed his paintings at the print market. Matteson was an Odd Fellow, temperance advocate, Democratic politician (elected to the legislature in 1855), Episcopalian, art critic for George Morris’s National Press, illustrator, and painter. Though from an upstate New York family, he was sometimes known as the Pilgrim Painter for Protestant-­themed historical pictures like the First Sabbath of the Pilgrims, Pilgrim Fathers on the Deck of the Mayflower, Signing the Contract on Board the Mayflower, and so on, many of them published as engravings in the 1850s by Broadway art dealer William Schaus.26 Like Currier’s “United American,” Matteson’s art stressed the republic’s origins in heroic ancestors, most often George Washington; but also like Morse, Matteson found those origins in theocratic moments like First Prayer in Congress. His picture The Spirit of ’76 (1844), painted and engraved, of modern young men inheriting the revolutionary spirit of their fathers, must have had special resonance for the members of the American Republican Party.

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13

In that year’s political campaign they were singing, “Then strike up ‘Hail Columbia!’ boys, our free and happy land, / We’ll startle knavish partisans and break the Jesuit’s band. / We’ll snap the reins, spurn party chains and priestly politics / We swear it by our father’s graves—our sires of Seventy Six!”27 Matteson’s picture has no overt religious symbolism, but it certainly emphasizes the heroic character of a native-­born young man who imitates the nation’s founders and his ancestors by leaving family and kin to join his brothers in a noble cause (cf. fig. 5). Spirit of ’76, along with Matteson’s New England–themed Sugaring Off, sold to the American Art-­Union, thanks to the intervention of a fellow artist, Democrat, and Art-­Union manager, who had his own ties to mechanics.28 Its career is a good example of the trajectory toward nativism of popular “Young America”–style patriotic art. Young America was a mostly Democratic movement, critical of “old fogies” in either party who did not support progress, understood as the expansion of civil rights. This included support for

Figure 5. John Chester Buttre, after Tompkins H. Matteson, “Spirit of 76,” in Wide-Awake Gift (New York: J. C. Derby, 1855), between pages 70 and 71. Public domain; image provided by the Internet Archive and the University of California. Buttre also engraved the book’s frontispiece and its portrait of Daniel Webster as “The Defender of the Constitution.”

14 Introduction

foreign democratic revolutions as well as expansion of U.S. territories.29 Thus when Matteson’s image of this fighting Spirit was engraved for a Whiggish weekly, its editor was critical of it as promoting a Democratic war with Mexico that might expand the republic, but also the reach of slavery. So too was Union magazine editor Caroline Kirkland, a Democrat but a pacifist, critical of Matteson’s pro-­war illustrations in that paper. Matteson, who would claim that he did more Mexican War pictures than any other artist, accordingly left for a paper edited by printer Benjamin Day, a founder of the Sun.30 Day, himself an artisan, was more sympathetic to the working-­class character of Young America’s demands for trade unions and land reform as well as its literary and artistic demands for a more democratic national school of art. From an engraving that endorsed an expansionist Democratic war, Matteson’s picture took on a more nativist coloring in Edward Walker’s Odd Fellows gift books. As with other gift books, Walker commissioned writers to compose essays to accompany engravings, sometimes original ones, but often reprints. He hired Matteson and Lossing to create designs and McRae to copy engravings that had appeared elsewhere. In 1851, Lewis G. Clark, editor of the Knickerbocker and a friend of Morris, promoted Matteson’s engraving in the Odd-­Fellows’ Offering. Titled “Freedom’s Holy Cause,” Clark’s essay cited Matteson’s picture (Clark retitled it “The Spirit of Seventeen Hundred and Seventy-­Six,” spelling the date out as Lossing had in his book) as an example of the ideal merger of Protestant religion (“a nation acknowledging Jehovah to be king”) with American patriotism (“the greatness of our country”). It was the fruitful seed of the patriot fathers, “our forefathers,” that gave their children their freedom, while Europe still writhed in shackles.31 An accompanying poem clarified the contrast in Morris-­like lyrics, calling Yankee boys “To arms! To arms!” to fight for sacred rights against the tyrant power. Implicitly, American seed was free, where European was not. Walker, the publisher and editor of the Odd Fellows’ annuals, republished brother (i.e., Odd Fellow member) Clark’s essay throughout the 1850s, just as he recycled other illustrations by brother Matteson, usually engraved by McRae. He published with them a roster of other contributors to nativist publications, including Walcutt, Sun editor C. D. Stuart, Morris, Lossing, and politician Charles Edwards Lester. These authors also wrote on American art. Odd Fellow brother Lossing, who wrote various highly Protestant and patriotic screeds for Walker, wrote a survey of Western art for Harper’s that included false anti-­Catholic anecdotes and ended patriotically with what he considered an American style, the log cabin. Odd Fellow Lester, who wrote for the Offering on the first reading of the English Bible, a scene engraved

Introduction

15

by McRae, also wrote Artists of America, patriotic even to its star-­spangled typography.32 An engraving of Matteson’s Spirit of ’76 eventually appeared in 1855’s Wide-­Awake Gift, along with a scene of Washington’s marriage painted by Matteson’s friend Junius Brutus Stearns that had also previously appeared in the Odd Fellows annuals, where it had been annotated by Lester (fig. 5).33 J. C. Derby, the publisher of this particular Know-­Nothing annual, advertised the Wide-­Awake Gift and the engraving in the sympathetic Sunday Dispatch, Evening Mirror, Express, and Day Book. Derby’s “fraternal” volume (written by “one of ’em”) opened with Washington’s Farewell Address, a favorite Know-­Nothing document, because it warned against partisanship opening the door to the insidious mischief of foreign influence. It had seven essays on the first president (including ones by Edward Everett and Erastus Brooks, the nativist editor of the Express, on Mount Vernon), as well as various iterations of “America for the Americans” taken from the Evening Mirror. John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence was on the frontispiece, along with the usual flag, eagle, portrait of Washington, and a somewhat uninspiring female allegory of Liberty. If the almanac had only two written odes to the Stars and Stripes and only one to the eagle, there were two essays on the Protestant Bible and ten on the Pilgrim forefathers and foremothers who constituted our “Native Land.” Even William Cullen Bryant’s poem “Seventy-­ Six” had a nativist flavor, with stout yeomen springing from the “sods of grove and glen” to battle tyranny and sacrifice for freedom, thereby ending the dangers of foreign influence: “In fragments fell the yoke abhorred— / The footstep of a foreign lord / Profaned the soil no more.”34 Matteson may not have had a say in his picture’s appearance in the Know-­ Nothing volume or shared the beliefs of the Know-­Nothings. Probably Ralph Waldo Emerson, who also was anthologized, wasn’t consulted, either. And like Daniel Huntington and Emanuel Leutze, artists associated with Young America who received regular and generous patronage from the American Art-­Union, Matteson painted some critiques of Protestant religious fanaticism, including a commissioned scene of the Salem witch trials and the pillory scene from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter in 1848. His own much reprinted story and illustration of “The Witch” for the Odd Fellows featured a noble young man clearing the reputation of his voluptuous (but chaste) beloved, suggesting that the lesson he imbibed from Hawthorne was less about the unpleasant rigidity of Sabbatarians and more about sins of the mother not being visited on future generations.35 His art club, the Art Re-­ Union, though its name suggested opposition to the American Art-­Union,

16 Introduction

had a mainstream membership, including National Academy stalwarts who sold to the Art-­Union, just as he did, and fellow George Washington specialists like Stearns. What were arguably elite sentiments in favor of restricting American citizenship to preserve their political power, articulated by well-­established conservatives like Clark, Morse, and Morris, found translations in the art of skilled artisans, illustrators, engravers, and painters, who like Walcutt worked for popular presses and periodicals. Walcutt, like Chapman and Matteson, illustrated themes with nativist connotations and found publishing outlets among the like-­minded in the newspaper world. His design for an extravagant Washington monument in New York was engraved by William Dunnel, who was a Washington portraitist himself and a member of both Matteson’s Art Re-­Union and Walcutt’s Sketch Club. Dunnel worked for Morris’s New Mir­ ror and the cheap weekly Sunday Dispatch (edited by an Odd Fellow), where Charles Burkhardt, a nativist, Sketch Club member, and Walcutt collaborator, also contributed. The dedication of Walcutt’s father-­in-­law’s New York church, the Thirteenth Street Presbyterian, was memorialized by poetry in the Odd Fellows’ Golden Rule, a paper that was not nativist, but nevertheless had a clear Protestant bias.36 That these artists worked in the same fraternal print world as engravers and journalists indeed suggests that their art was aimed at a different audience than the one that bought more expensive oil paintings. Put differently, their art has some of the same sentimental and patriotic characteristics that made True Americanism (as Know-­Nothings called their doctrines barring immigrants from political participation) popular. Indirectly, their illustrations competed with seemingly similar historical and allegorical paintings by more acclaimed artists like Emanuel Leutze and Thomas Rossiter, which like Matteson’s were often bought or engraved by the American Art-­Union as part of its own effort to appeal to a wider audience than was usual for fine art. For example, Emanuel Leutze’s famous picture of George Washington Crossing the Delaware (1852) would seem to be another contribution to the worship of Washington, perhaps even capitalizing on the devotion to him fostered by groups like the United Americans and Know-­ Nothings. A twentieth-­century artist, Grant Wood, pointed to such connotations when he lampooned it as the false darling (Leutze was born in Germany and painted it there) of a later nineteenth-­century nativist group, the Daughters of the American Revolution (fig. 6).37 The energy and vigor of Washington and his men has dissipated into the puritanical and genteel features of their descendants. But comparing Leutze’s painting to the scene as presented by Henry Brueckner in the American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum highlights Leutze’s emphasis

Introduction

17

Figure 6. Grant Wood, Daughters of Revolution, 1932, oil on Masonite, 20 × 39 inches, ­Cincinnati Museum of Art. Copyright 2020 Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image provided by Wikimedia Commons.

on progress, rather than the deifying (static) tableaux preferred by conservatives (fig. 7).38 Brueckner, another of John McRae’s sources for patriotic engravings, is best known for his portrayal of Washington’s piety at Valley Forge. In it, he isolates Washington, in prayer, from his men. His revision of Leutze’s drama of the crossing also separates Washington from his men, by horse and position, as he contends less with the icy river than with a Quaker who seems to caution him about moving forward. The men, piled in a mass, sink into the forest; the equestrian Washington is profiled against the clouds. The effect is closer to John Trumbull’s 1790 portrait of Washington for the city of New York, where the arriving troops are pushed to the background, than to Leutze. Brueckner based the scene on a Benson Lossing anecdote in his history of the revolution, which stressed not a heroic advance so much as Washington’s ability to unify the disaffected.39 Brueckner and Lossing both emphasize hierarchy, seeing the pilots and rowers as insignificant compared to the generals; nativist politician Joel T. Headley’s bestselling book on Washington was titled Washington & His Generals.40 Leutze’s picture by contrast was a much more powerful statement of democracy, in which the ordinary man propels Washington forward rather than meekly trailing after, and Leutze was much admired by Young America believers in progress.

18 Introduction

Figure 7. Henry Brueckner, “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” The American Odd-Fellows’ Museum (New York: Edward Walker, 1856), 281. Public domain; image provided by author.

Both the melodrama and the piety of historical painting, even or especially when found in the style of celebrated artists like Leutze, were satirized at the time. The Lantern, edited by a Protestant Irish nationalist who was an honorary member of Walcutt’s Sketch Club, published a series of “Tableaux of American History” that mocked the enthusiasm of cultural nationalists for “native” subjects (fig. 8). Thomas Butler Gunn, the cartoonist, reduces Leutze’s commanding style to a kind of patriotic humbug. Where Leutze painted Columbus as an independent truth seeker at court, Gunn’s Columbus, to the dismay of the Spanish king and queen, brings back authentic Americana, which turns out to be both inauthentic and unexotic: wooden nutmegs, cigars, assimilated Indians, Colt pistols, and a screeching American eagle. Matteson’s favorite subject, the Mayflower Pilgrims, in Gunn’s hands resemble the Native Americans who greet them, equally greedy and exploitative. In a scene of Spanish conquest, an Aztec chief shoots Cortés with a gun, while a Black man keeps time. Leutze’s version of the Spanish invasion, the Storming of the Teocalli (1848), by showing both sides as equally bloodthirsty, had advocated for religious tolerance.41 Gunn’s picture mocks the very way artists like Matteson, Chapman, Leutze, and Brueckner take such ostensible motivations as religion (rather than actual economic or land-­grabbing ones) seriously.

Introduction

Figure 8. Thomas Butler Gunn, “Tableaux of American History,” Lantern, vol. 1.: Top: “The Invasion of Mexico by Cortez,” April 17, 1852, 162. Middle: “The Landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock,” March 6, 1852, 86. Bottom: “Columbus P ­ resenting the Fruits of the Discovery to Ferdinand and I­ sabella,” March 20, 1852, 106. Public domain; images provided by Google and ­Harvard University.

19

20 Introduction

That this demand for realism, rather than a more sweeping or devout rhetoric, expressed a conservative skepticism about human progress in arenas such as antislavery or foreign wars for liberation is signaled by Gunn later contributing illustrations to a Know-­Nothing almanac and a Young America almanac, both published by engraver Thomas W. Strong.42 Strong’s various vehicles (he also had a “Yankee” humor magazine and an illustrated newspaper edited by nativist poet C. D. Stuart) were sympathetic to artisans.43 Strong even designed the masthead for the nativist workingmen’s journal America’s Own. But like the conservative Whig views expressed in Know-­ Nothing Party newspapers, his satirical papers were skeptical of liberal reformers’ ambitions to end slavery, intemperance, or tyranny abroad, and feared that their efforts to do so would disrupt the existing Union. Walcutt’s notebooks were filled with ideas for paintings from American history like the ones Gunn mocked, most set during the Revolution. Vanity Fair, writing at about the time Walcutt turned from painting to sculpture, suggested that such historical pictures of America’s origins were not produced by elite artists at the National Academy, but by too-­Democratic Irish artists, and were no longer in fashion. “Raphael O’Titian,” supposedly one of Vanity Fair’s illustrators, in a drunken outburst complains that his patriotic picture of Columbus was unjustly refused by the Academy (fig. 9). Vanity Fair caricatures

Figure 9. “Columbus Aroused by the Cry of ‘Land.’ ” With An Authentic Negro and Patch of the Period. Raphael O’Titian. (Rejected by the Committee).” Vanity Fair, April 28, 1860, 276. Public domain; image provided by the Vault at Pfaff’s.

Introduction

21

his imaginary painting, which features Columbus in a stars-­and-­stripes tunic, Patch—this is perhaps a pun on Sam Patch, a popular stage character, a comic Yankee famous for his feat of jumping Niagara Falls—and what Vanity Fair calls an Authentic Negro (i.e., a stereotyped one). The editors of the humor magazine are mocking the immigrant O’Titian’s idea of American art as composed by such supposedly democratic subjects and styles. As Gunn’s and Vanity Fair’s efforts indicate, the sort of “true American” history painting admired by Young America and the Know-­Nothings, the soldiers, Indians, and yeomen (who also appeared on engraved newspaper mastheads and banknotes), were increasingly consigned to the realm of popular illustration, not fine art. But they didn’t disappear, and the artists who created them, many of whom depended on illustrating weekly papers like Vanity Fair, tried to create alternatives to the art associations that excluded them.

1

A Native-­Born Artist

William Walcutt was a major contributor to the Order of United Americans’ organ, the Republic. Not that he illustrated the monthly periodical—he sent in poetry and historical accounts. The editor, Thomas R. Whitney, was himself an engraver (and a poet and politician elected to Congress in 1855 as a Know-­ Nothing), and Whitney seems to have called on friends in the trade to help with the task of illustrating it. Whitney personally sketched the frontispiece, and William Howland, whom New Englander Whitney described as “a lineal descendant of one of the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock,” engraved it (fig. 10). The armed American eagle, atop a globe, presides over an erect U.S. soldier, who draws up the flag to show to a crouching Indian “our country,” filled with commerce. The two men and the two principles of patriotism and liberty (including the symbol of a slave’s emancipation, the liberty cap) each rest on columns composed of the names of great Americans. Whitney’s literary edifice also relied on a stable of illustrators and writers. Irish Protestant Nathaniel Orr—one of Orr’s apprentices was a member of the Order, and Orr illustrated for the American Tract Society as well as the Odd Fellows’ Golden Rule— engraved the symbol of Whitney’s Order of United Americans. That symbol was a militant fist, grasping an open-­mouthed—expiring—snake, perhaps representing the insidious foe, whose body was entwined with the Order’s initials.1 Whitney attracted successful artisans like Orr and Walcutt to his enterprise. Benson Lossing, like brothers Nathaniel and John Orr an owner of a major wood engraving firm and an Odd Fellow, was another one of them. Lossing is notable for both his thoroughly nativist sentiments—very hostile to Romanism, or the idea of the pope wielding political influence in the 23

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Figure 10. William Howland, after Thomas R. Whitney, frontispiece, The Republic 1, no. 1, January 1851. Public ­domain; image provided by Google and the University of Minnesota.

United States through priests and Catholic immigrants—and for his denial of ever being a nativist. One of Lossing’s engravings for the Republic, “Kissing the Pope’s Toe,” was interpreted by Whitney as illustrating “the unbridled ambition of the politico-­religious despotism of Rome, and the humiliating attitude” of those under its sway (fig. 11). By the time Lossing illustrated a Know-­Nothing Almanac, “Anti–Pope’s Toeism” was part of the party’s established doctrine.2 But the participation of Lossing and Orr in the newspaper did not mean that these artists were members of the United Americans, or Whitney would have likely proclaimed it, as he did when the Democratic actor Edwin Forrest, famous for his manly roles at the working-­class Bowery Theatre, joined the United Americans. Nor was Lossing an official member of any of the nativist political parties, even though he complained about drunken Irish demagogues and ignorant naturalized citizens. Nevertheless, his popular illustrated histories of the U.S., published by firms like Edward

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Figure 11. Lossing & Barrett, “Kissing the Pope’s Toe,” The Republic 1, no. 3, March 1851, frontispiece. Public domain; image provided by Google and the University of Minnesota.

Walker’s and Harper’s, conveyed the same nationalist and anti-­immigrant sentiment that lay behind the Republic’s nativism. As Lossing wrote in his 1851 Pictorial Field-­Book of the Revolution, “Man loves the soil that gave him birth . . . though he may, by legal oath, disclaim allegiance to his own, and swear fealty to another government,” the original link to the soil can’t be severed.3 Walcutt likely was not an American Party member, either. But in the Republic’s two years of existence, he provided it with the kind of ancestor worship—stories of the heroic actions of ordinary soldiers in the country’s two wars with England—that met nativist demands for patriotic Anglo-­American, Protestant origin tales. In it he published a series of recollections of his grandfather’s Revolutionary War service, a series of recollections of his father’s War of 1812 anecdotes, twelve poems, and a short story. He also sent poems to the expensive literary magazine the Knickerbocker, edited by L. G. Clark of ­“Freedom’s Holy Cause,” and to the Sun, where Republic contributors C. D. Stuart and M. M. Noah had worked.4 Whitney and other Republic con­ tributors knew Walcutt personally—the paper recounted studio visits and updated readers on his doings. One of those visitors was a Jewish author; the

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Know-­Nothings said almost nothing about Jews, who in New York were a long-­established, and so “native,” voting bloc, comprising only a small portion of the new immigrants.5 Walcutt, then, makes a good case study of an artist whose milieu, at the very least, was suffused with nativism. His entrée into these circles in New York seems likely to have come from his father-­in-­law, the Presbyterian minister Samuel D. Burchard, just as later his patronage job as an art appraiser in a New York’s customs house was probably due to having a brother-­in-­law who worked in the Treasury under Ulysses Grant. Though William didn’t marry the Reverend Burchard’s stepdaughter, Agnes Leeds, until 1854, his wife’s autograph album indicates that they were close well before that. It also indicates that Burchard’s household was devout and well-­educated; the clergyman’s dedication in Agnes’s autograph book concludes with a poem wishing that love, friendship, and virtue will be mingled in the mental flowers therein. Among the album’s poems and sketches, Walcutt contributed a rather sexy half-­naked nymph whose allure bespoke the power of art, and perhaps of Agnes, too; in a poem Walcutt wrote her, he describes how she draws around her minds of worth, the “living suns that light the earth.”6 This seems to be true. Agnes was a gifted musician, and perhaps thanks in part to her friendships with poets, artists, and composers, the Burchards’s home welcomed all sorts of writers and reformers. Burchard even hosted Walcutt’s Sketch Club at his house; art when “robed in purity” was a welcome moral preacher, and Walcutt, in his history of art, concurred: “It should be the aim of every artist to paint nothing but good, noble and pure subjects—such pictures as virtue will not blush to look upon, such pictures as will teach a happy lesson.”7 But Burchard’s household was also critical of the pope and the influence of the Catholic Church. Burchard today in fact is mostly remembered for causing Republican presidential candidate James Blaine to lose the 1884 presidential election to Grover Cleveland on just these grounds. At a ministerial reception in New York, Burchard praised Blaine for battling “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.” His quote indicates that he and the other ministers active in the party saw Romanism, a term for Catholicism that emphasizes the Vatican’s role, as a threat to political liberty and the Union. Given that most Catholics in New York were Democrats, this threat was easily conflated with a threat to Republican control of the government. The Democrats promptly publicized Burchard’s slogan as characteristic of Republican hostility to Catholics, and it supposedly lost Blaine New York, though since Grover Cleveland had been governor of New York, he had a good base there anyway. The fatal (to Republican dominance) event was even illustrated in Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant’s history of the United States, which was

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published by Scribner’s, a firm founded by a devout Presbyterian that had employed Walcutt as an illustrator (fig. 12). Bryant, a New England Unitarian and Democrat whose antislavery politics turned him Republican, was a firm opponent of nativist plans to take the franchise away from immigrants. But as late as 1871 he would be publicly advocating, with former antislavery comrades like Henry Ward Beecher (and Burchard), for Protestant bibles in the public schools to keep Catholic political influence at bay.8 The same sentiments are visible in his history of the nation. Bryant’s 1876 preface narrates the triumph of an American spirit that rid the nation of slavery. Not accidentally, that spirit begins with the “northmen” who discovered the continent and continues with the achievements of the people he calls an “offshoot of the great European stock.”9 In this narrative, the postwar loss of the Republican hold on the presidency signaled by Cleveland’s election—the first Democrat since the Civil War—was a revolution that the historian needed to contain and explain. Perhaps that explains why the illustration in it of Burchard’s speech, in the very calmness of its vast assembly of respectably black-­frocked ministers, harkens to John Trumbull’s Signing of the Declaration of Independence, a favorite ancestral picture of national agreement and unity for the conservative Know-­Nothings, too.

Figure 12. Thure de Thulstrup, “The Ministerial Reception given Mr. Blaine at the Fifth ­Avenue Hotel, October 29, 1884, at which the ‘Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion’ Speech was made,” William Cullen Bryant, Sydney Howard Gay and Noah Brooks, Scribner’s Popular ­History of the United States (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), 5:552. Public domain; image provided by Google and Michigan State University.

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Walcutt met Burchard well before he was introduced to the minister’s stepdaughter. Walcutt attended a Congregationalist school in Granville, Ohio, in the 1830s. The Walcutt family descended from Quakers, which may account for their longstanding antislavery sentiments, but by 1839, the family Bible indicates that they were Presbyterian. An elegant volume, this type of larger, more expensive Bible with pages for family records, helped root one’s membership in a family in a sense of religious belonging. Granville, settled by a Massachusetts land company, was a hotbed of antislavery and religious feeling. It supported a number of schools that attracted students from nearby towns like Columbus, where the Walcutts lived: the Congregationalist Granville Academy, where Walcutt went, the Baptist Granville College, the Episcopal Female Seminary, and the Presbyterian Female Seminary.10 Burchard had graduated from a similar small college in neighboring Kentucky and got his minister’s license in 1838, which is when Walcutt first painted his portrait (location unknown).11 Throughout the 1830s, Burchard was an itinerant in the region, preaching on temperance and abolition, and may have passed through Granville or Columbus before being hired in New York in 1839. The Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church in New York, where he spent most of his career, was a “free” church—it didn’t sell pews, a practice that, while it provided income, also created a distinct hierarchy within the congregation— putting Burchard on the side of church liberals.12 The Reverend Burchard was clearly interested in redeeming the working class. After a terrible explosion in the boiler of a printing press manufacturer that destroyed the whole building (a building owned by the Harper brothers) and killed and wounded almost a hundred men and boys, Burchard tried to create a monument to the slain in Greenwood cemetery in Brooklyn.13 The city too had paid tribute to the workers by offering free burials to those killed in the calamity, an important gesture of social recognition because it afforded what was considered a decent interment, unlike burial in New York’s potter’s field. The value of a proper burial is signaled by the newspapers noting whether the men who died in the Hague Street explosion had been members of fraternal societies that (like the Odd Fellows) provided funeral benefits. Burchard, however, was not involved in these charitable burials, but rather in the creation of a symbolic working-­class hero of the tragedy. Burchard singled out a fifteen-­year-­old, Samuel Tindale, who had been trapped in the rubble of the building for twenty hours, and who despite his wounds had remained cheerful. He died shortly after being rescued. Tindale, born in New York (nine of the approximately sixty-­seven dead factory workers were born in Ireland), had been active in the Presbyterian Sabbath school and

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Burchard saw him as a Christian hero whose faith had sustained him during his ordeal.14 Burchard with other ministers proposed a funeral monument to Tindale, designed by Walcutt, for the Protestant landscape of Greenwood cemetery (fig. 13).15 The sketch for the monument shows a female allegory of Religion lifting Tindale from the rubble, instead of the firemen who actually did it, though their names were to be inscribed on the pedestal. As would be true in Walcutt’s later funerary sculptures, the material actuality of the bodies of the real members of the working-­class heroes, are translated into neoclassical female personifications and idealizations, designed to express the universality of the men’s spirit. Such a monument was intended to be popular, to integrate piety and sentiment in a site where families and visitors preserved the memories of the notable and the unknown. The design was also to be published in a gift book issued by the Methodist Sunday School Union. In the meantime, it appeared, with editorial approval, in the newspaper America’s Own,

Figure 13. J. H. Byram after William Walcutt, “Monument to Young ­T indale,” America’s Own, November 23, 1850. Public domain; image provided by author.

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a cheap weekly devoted to the working classes and firemen. Chief editor Edmund Child may have known Burchard or Walcutt from Ohio, as Child had lived in Cincinnati, where he attended a Baptist church.16 His paper promoted some of the New York Sketch Club members—not just Walcutt and painter/sculptor Rembrandt Lockwood, but honorary member Julia Dean, as well. Dean had gotten her start acting in Kentucky and Ohio before moving to the working-­class Bowery Theatre, home to United Americans star Edwin Forrest.17 In a transition consonant with its attention to artisan culture, over time America’s Own would aim itself more at women and the “home circle”; domesticity, like the fraternities, offered an alternative to the competitive market world of the workplace, though domesticity’s more private character did not offer such a clear steppingstone to political or public action. The tendency toward nativism of America’s Own came not just from religion, but from the editors’ fairly radical dedication to white workingmen’s (and women’s) brotherhood. Though the editors were proud of their native birth and were distinctly Protestant (one editor noted his descent from the earliest Puritan settlers), their greatest fear was industrialization’s erosion of workers’ economic independence. An editorial on capitalism warned readers that the factory lords, “our tyrants sing soothing lullabys while labor is battling with grim want . . . where will this stop? Nothing short, fellow workers, of pauperism and our disfranchisement.” The sun of our liberty is fast going down, they continued, and it won’t rise again, “unless through blood” workers rebuke our rulers. The emaciated form of Liberty pleads with her sons “To rouse like lions from their slumber— / To shake their chains to earth like dew / Which in sleep have fallen on you, / For ye are many—they are few.”18 The implication that white workers are in chains did not correspond with support for enslaved African Americans. Slavery, the result of capitalists extracting profit from labor, was clearly an evil, and the abolitionist James Redpath wrote for America’s Own.19 But as in John Brougham’s pro-­Irish Lantern, abolitionists’ seeming indifference to the plight of white workers made antislavery almost un-­American, especially in the movement’s threat to the very Union that had given those workers their political power. In the editors’ call to workers to wake up to their plight, to their eroded or “emaciated” economic and political rights, is the seed of future ties to political nativism.20 America’s Own would become the organ of the Order of United American Mechanics, a benevolent and fraternal organization that competed for artisans with Whitney’s Order of United Americans. Though it too did not permit the foreign-­born to join, it was more class-­conscious in also barring merchants, bankers, and professionals. The paper also supported a secret society for land reform (distribution of public lands in the West to

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citizens was a popular cause), the nativist Brotherhood of the Union. By 1854, the editors openly argue that no Catholic can be a citizen, and support Know-­ Nothing and Odd Fellow James W. Barker for mayor as “the people’s” candidate.21 This shift toward nativism is visible in the paper’s increasingly idealized mastheads (fig. 14). In an early version, designed by engraver, stationer, and publisher T. W. Strong, whose later interest in nativism and Young America expansionism paralleled the paper’s, a youthful but muscular male worker, with his seated female counterpart, stands in front of the flag. Like Tindale, who America’s Own said had “true moral courage,” or the firemen whom the editor called almost superhuman, the masthead proclaims that the deeds of American workers promise to exceed the great of ancient and modern history. The editor grumbled that readers thought that the woman on the masthead wasn’t handsome enough. He replied that she wasn’t a fashionable butterfly, but instead was one who with her sturdy companion will throw off the chains around our Model Republic. Chief editor Edmund Child advocated a kind of Christian socialism, which he distinguished from European red republicanism—his was the Republicanism of George Washington. Land reform along his lines would provide farms to all Americans (not the foreign born), a plan buttressed by expansion westward, perhaps indicated by the masthead’s insanely long flag. But this working-­class hero would become a wide-­awake Sam.22 As the paper became more nativist, fearing native-­born women would be reduced to the condition of the new foreigners, a new masthead exiled the republic’s modern-­day workers and firemen to vignettes, though a Masonic symbol of labor, the hammer, still joined men and women (fig. 14). But the center was instead given to a historic battle scene, with larger-­than-­life American soldiers from the colonial and national eras. The design emphasized the continuity between them and the present-­day worker, that same inheritance that nativist poets celebrated. In the newspaper, the content similarly emphasized an Anglo-­American tradition. There were stories of the Revolution, including the tearing down of the statue of King George III in Bowling Green, New York. Samuel Morse wrote about Lafayette warning Americans against popery, while nativist historian and minister J. T. Headley wrote on Commodore Perry’s victory in the War of 1812. Like the Revolution, stories of the War of 1812 reinforced the connection between the two Anglo-­ Saxon countries even as they patriotically claimed that the U.S. advanced their shared republican principles. Thus there were also stories of homegrown pioneer heroes, like Ohio adventurer Simon Kenton. Kentucky poet William Ross Wallace published a poem describing the True American Citizen. Though Walcutt’s Tindale memorial as featured in America’s Own was never

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Figure 14. America’s Own mastheads, top to bottom: Thomas W. Strong, April 14, 1849; September 22, 1849; September 14, 1850; T. Horton & Co. after J. Oertel, January 1, 1854. Public domain; images provided by author.

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built, Walcutt would tackle in paint and marble several of these same subjects. America’s Own at the same time became more evangelical, supporting Sabbath laws and Protestant bibles in the public schools, as well as encouraging artists like Child’s brother-­in-­law, Rembrandt Lockwood, who were known for their allegorical-­religious painting and anti-­t yranny (so, to some, anti-­Rome) messages. With its increasing religious devotion, the publication introduced allegorical women to the masthead, relegating workers and their industries to the background. Indians, contemplating civilization, replace workers in the side vignettes—they are necessary, perhaps, as cues to Americanism, since the masthead has now lost other identifiably “native” features in the universals of allegory. By 1853, the masthead is completely allegorical. It was engraved by poet and artist Tudor Horton, an engraver for Whitney’s Republic, and designed by Johannes Oertel, an engraver from Nuremberg, Germany, who may have known Lockwood in Munich, and who would become an Episcopalian minister. In it, Liberty, with the Phrygian cap of the emancipated slave (antislavery was part of the evangelical vision), sends tyrants with their chains fleeing, while shedding light on the muses. But “real” American workers—who would have to include immigrants—are absent. Walcutt, like Burchard, had working-­class sympathies and allies, as the support of America’s Own for him and his monument indicates. Many of these stemmed from his experiences in Ohio. After following Burchard to New York in 1841, he returned to Columbus, Ohio, where he set up an artist’s studio with two of his brothers, who were also artists (fig. 15). He mostly painted portraits, the most artisanal of the fine art genres, including Columbus’s mayor and his family. The mayor, like William Seward in New York and William Henry Harrison in Ohio, was an anti-­Masonic Whig, who worked at a Mechanics’ bank, suggesting he had some anti-­elite positions.23 Walcutt also had some prominent Democratic commissions while he was in Ohio, including in 1842 the portrait of politician Lewis Cass of Michigan, who would be noted for his defense of Protestants in Europe. Like Stephen Douglas, Cass would be an advocate for popular sovereignty when it came to territories choosing slavery—the position of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a paper that backed Walcutt’s more successful later monument building.24 He next tried the waters in Cincinnati, with some success, before moving to New York in 1847, where one of his first commissions was for portraits of Samuel Burchard and his stepdaughter Agnes. Artists quite sensibly avoided becoming overtly partisan, if only to better preserve patronage possibilities, but the Walcutt family’s mix of expansionist and working-­class sympathies and antislavery convictions seems to have

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Figure 15. Photograph of the ten surviving Walcutt children (the firstborn, Mary, died before this was taken) of John Macy and Muriel Broderick Walcutt, gathered around William’s c. 1850 portrait of their mother. Undated. Standing (l to r): Maggie, John, Oliver S., and ­William. Sitting (l to r): George E., Phebe, Charles C., Virginia, David Broderick, and Ann. Artists David Broderick and George E. painted mostly in Ohio. Charles C. became a Union general in the Civil War and later Republican mayor of Columbus. Public domain; image provided by John Walcutt.

prevented them from aligning with either the Democrats or the Whigs. Walcutt’s brother George formed and captained a militia company that he took to fight in the war with Mexico, waged under Democratic President James Polk. On the other hand, Ohio state Whigs hired William in 1841 to paint William Henry Harrison as a gift for the state of Kentucky, and in 1844, a presidential election year, one of the Walcutt brothers painted a twenty-­six-­ foot silk election banner in Columbus for Polk’s opponent, Henry Clay. It featured a farmer and a sailor, symbols of Clay’s artisanal support.25 Banner painting, like sign painting and the work George Walcutt did for the Masons and Odd Fellows, was more artisanal than fine art. This, and of course its more public character, meant it was associated with mass protest. Emancipation banners in 1842 caused a riot because they linked Black agency to classical liberty and the American revolution.26

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To be an artisan meant that one engaged in corporate—fraternal—conviviality. In an early painting attributed to William, a tavern scene said to be the Eagle Coffee House in Columbus, Ohio, the mostly young men do just that. One more patriarchal gentleman, seated, seems removed from the hubbub, intent on his newspaper, with his market basket by his side. Gathered together, the young men tilt their chairs back, order drinks, gesticulate, roll up newspapers, and read advertisements for the Grand Rally of the democracy and for book auctions (fig. 16).27 Such tavern scenes featuring “vulgar” peasants have a long iconography. Since British artist David Wilkie’s genre paintings from the start of the nineteenth century, they have tended to mock ordinary citizens’ aspirations to participate in politics. When the Odd Fellows published Wilkie’s Village Politicians—in the same book as a Walcutt engraving—the editor distinguished American free expression of political sentiment from the foolishness of the British commoners in Wilkie’s painting.28 By foolishness he probably meant alcohol. The same volume also illustrated a temperance message, “reclaiming an Odd Fellow,” a scene in a tavern, suggesting that viewers of these pictures might see themselves as different from the drinkers in them. The American branch of the Odd Fellows, influenced by evangelical Protestants, banned “sociability” (i.e.,

Figure 16. William Walcutt, Eagle Coffee House, 1840 (?), oil on canvas, 24 3/4 × 187/8 inches. Collection of John and Mary Anne Walcutt. Public domain; photograph by John Walcutt.

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drinking), offering artisans their halls as an alternative to taverns. So, like the Odd Fellows’ meetings, when groups of ordinary white men meet in genre paintings set in the U.S., compositions foreground shared interests, in pleasures like drinking, perhaps, but also in trade or other kinds of group activities. The Eagle Coffee House was Whig headquarters in Columbus, and Walcutt’s painting indicates that in the state capital such inherently political (as conversations about group rights almost always are) conversations were lively and that newspapers were a vital part of this fraternal—political, artisanal, and satirical—culture. So when Walcutt arrived in New York, several things made him a candidate for endorsement by the nativist press: he was from an artisanal background; his father and brothers were involved in farming, chair manufacturing, and operating paint stores and news depots; his family traced their descent from Revolutionary War soldiers and England; he was a devout Protestant with a classical education; he was antislavery; and he had patronage from both parties. This was not an atypical profile for male artists. For example, Walcutt’s friend, the sculptor Thomas D. Jones, had much the same sort of artisanal connections. He is perhaps best known today for patenting his statue of Lincoln, a move that bespeaks pride in ingenious mechanical invention. He was in Granville at about the same time Walcutt was, in 1837, and like him and Walcutt’s artist brother David Broderick, went on to work in Columbus, Cincinnati, and New York. In New York, he joined Walcutt’s Sketch Club and cooperative artist’s association, and he received a similar boost from the antislavery and Whig wing of the Know-­Nothings, though like Walcutt, there is no evidence that Jones was politically active himself.29 Walcutt’s Whig connections in New York were perhaps most helpful initially. In 1851, the same year he started contributing to the United Americans’ Republic, he won a $200 prize for designing one side of a Clay medal. Walcutt lists the Kentucky senator’s accomplishments inside a wreath composed of wheat, corn, cotton, tobacco, and hemp, the whole to be stamped into California gold (fig. 17). The design’s emphasis, from the array of Northern and Southern crops to the choice of achievements to the source of the metal, is on Compromise.30 Henry Clay was, with Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, the Southern architect of the legislative Compromise that brought California into the Union as a free state at the cost of a law requiring escaped formerly enslaved men and women in the Northern states be returned to their owners. The medal was commissioned by the grateful Union Safety Committee of New York, which met in October 1850 shortly after California’s admission and in the wake of a fierce abolitionist reaction to the Fugitive Slave Law. The Union Safety Committee was in many ways mainstream: it

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Figure 17. William Walcutt, Thomas D. Jones, and Caleb Cushing Wright, Henry Clay Medal, 1852, 3 1/2 inches, gold, for the Union Safety Committee. Public domain; images ­provided by Heritage Auctions.

collected 5,000 signatures in support of the Compromise. Most of the city’s merchants and many of its art patrons supported it and the Compromise, including Williams & Stevens, the art dealer that would publish a “Citizen Know-­Nothing” lithograph, and safe maker Silas C. Herring, one of Walcutt’s sitters and a conservative Clay-­Webster Whig (see fig. 2).31 In the medal’s silver case are listed the leaders of the Union Safety Committee; at the top is Daniel Ullmann, a founder and leader of the Know-­ Nothings. Not surprisingly, when the Proceedings of the Union Meeting was published, Washington’s Farewell Address was appended. His Address, which urged citizens to obey the law in order to preserve the Union, was appropriate, but by this time, thanks to its stress on the corrupting power of foreign influence, it was also strongly associated with nativism. The medal itself was presented to Clay by his fellow Whig Millard Fillmore, who had signed the Compromise legislation and who became a Know-­Nothing presidential candidate. The orator’s veristic portrait on the medal was modeled by Walcutt’s friend Jones, whose bust of George Law, another Know-­Nothing presidential candidate (considered more antislavery than Fillmore), would be celebrated at the Sketch Club by Ohio poet and nativist William W. Fosdick. Jones had something of an industry producing plaster busts of Whig politicians in Ohio at $5 apiece. He also did busts of Fosdick and at least five other Sketch Club members, and both Jones and Walcutt created portraits of the Clay medal’s

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engraver, C. C. Wright. Small portrait busts like these and the Clay medal, which were reproduced and sold, perhaps because of their miniaturized and so possessable character, solidified personal and political sympathies even more than painted portraits.32 Thinking about Walcutt as an artisan whose patronage was tied to engravers and die-­cutters draws attention to a certain class consciousness that he seemed to retain throughout his career. Most male artists in this period began as sign painters, engravers, stonecutters, house painters, and so on, and then with training from an apprenticeship or classes at places like the National Academy of Design shifted into the realm of the fine arts. This was true of Walcutt and his brothers, even though his father, a furniture manufacturer, store owner, and real estate investor, was well enough off to give his sons a liberal education. Perhaps aware of William’s interest in drawing, his father even tried to get William into West Point, one of the few colleges to offer instruction in art, but William refused. Yet though the Walcutt brothers became professional artists and valued that status, they retained ties to craft practices. George Walcutt ran the first museum in downtown Columbus, Ohio, and in an 1848 advertisement for it joked about his origins: he said he was “ready to turn ye out a correct likeness, an exquisite landscape, beautiful Silk Banner [or] the neatest Masonic and Odd Fellows Aprons, and Masonic Carpets imaginable [at the] Corner of High and Town Streets, upstairs, at the sign of the industrious painter. . . . All kinds of painting done, except house painting, which will be done if brought to his rooms.” The museum (1851–58) too had a mixed character more typical of Mechanics’ Institute exhibitions than the National Academy of Design: 100 oil paintings (including a copy of Walcutt’s portrait of President Harrison), over 20 good wax figures, almost 300 birds and fossils, and curiosities, including pictures of the 1847 flood.33 David Broderick Walcutt, like George, remained based in Columbus and advertised in the Whig Columbus Gazette, which was edited by a Mason and an Odd Fellow. David had distinguished himself by being one of only a handful of American artists to have a painting accepted by the 1855 Paris Salon while he was in that city with William, studying art. But in Columbus he painted portraits for the State Capitol, where William described their brother George once doing an irreverent headstand, and like George, exhibited at state and agricultural fairs. The Walcutts also retained ties with the mechanical, in the sense of practical, side of art.34 Long after taking art classes in New York and Paris, William patented a type of folding sofabed (fig. 18). In his sketches, one can see the impulse behind it, to preserve “the exact shape of a sofa or a bedstead,” keeping both kinds of furniture perfectly

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Figure 18. United States Patent Office No. 124,990, William Walcutt, Improvement in Sofa-Bedsteads, Patented March 26, 1872. Public domain; image provided by David Walcutt.

symmetrical, despite transforming one into the other by alternately concealing and projecting the legs. The desire behind it is akin to preserving neoclassical purity of outline, in which “movements are accomplished without breaking the plane . . . without producing gaps, laps, or other disarrangement of parts.”35 Walcutt saw himself as a modern American artist, excelling the old masters in sentiment and expression, but he remained loyal, especially in his sculpture, to neoclassicism, the style of the Industrial Revolution. As importantly, he retained the idea of artisanal brotherhood. Wherever he went, Walcutt founded and joined cooperative, mutual-­benefit artist associations, aimed at education and exhibition. In New York, there was the

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American Artists Association (AAA), a cooperative alternative to the American Art-­Union, and the New York Sketch Club, an alternative for younger artists to the older, exclusive Knickerbocker Sketch Club. When he moved to Cleveland, he started a Sketch Club there, too. He and New York Sketch Club member Ferdinand Boyle supported the creation of the Western Academy in St. Louis, while William’s brother David was living there.36 T. D. Jones, who like most sculptors began as a stonecutter, similarly joined associations. After being a fellow officer of Walcutt’s American Artists Association in New York, back in Ohio he joined the Cincinnati Sketch Club (whose journal was edited by poet W. W. Fosdick) and was a founder of the Associated Artists of Cincinnati.37 These associations were different from benevolent orders like the Odd Fellows or Order of United Americans, or from secret political societies like the Young America Brotherhood or Know-­Nothings, of course. Nor did they really resemble guilds or trade unions, though their membership was limited to artists and benefits included sharing the costs of models. To an extent they breathed the air of Associationism, the belief of utopian socialists that individuals who combined their economic power in associations could establish an alternative to market capitalism and its individualist ethos. Perhaps they most closely resembled the corporate body, something signaled in the New-­ Yorker’s recommendation that the American Artists Association apply for a state charter.38 Through the cooperation of individuals pursuing their mutual and private (or “temporal,” as one journal put it) interest as artists in a corporate or joint stock agreement, their work, by being taken out of the market by this cooperation, would benefit the larger public by being devoted not to economic gain but instead to the “true purposes” of art.39 It is not too much of a stretch to see nativist organizations in similar terms, as assuming a similarly protective stance against the market and foreign competition for the native-­born voter and worker, with a similar rationale of public benefit.

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After Emanuel Leutze’s huge success exhibiting Washington Crossing the Delaware in New York, the American Art-­Union not surprisingly offered that artist, by then back working in Germany where he was born, another commission—it had previously paid him $1,000 for a painting (cf. fig. 6).1 A cooperative association of native-­born painters in New York, who were getting twenty dollars for their efforts from the same Art-­Union, helped kill the organization not long after, with the assistance of writers in friendly presses. Walcutt helped found this association, the patriotically named American Artists Association, a few years after he had succeeded in organizing the New York Sketch Club, which included some of the major illustrators of the city. British-­born illustrator of the Southern landscape (for Harper’s New Monthly and the Knickerbocker) and son of a Baptist minister, T. Addison Richards dedicated a poem to the Sketch Club in which he cheerfully acknowledged that the contributors’ wages came not in gold but in appreciation of Nature.2 As this suggests, both of Walcutt’s associations had as members successful artists like Richards, but not many had wealthy individual or corporate patrons like the Art-­Union. The American Artists Association in particular was meant to protect and elevate artists who, for the most part, would not be elected to the National Academy and who worked at least part-time outside the market for fine art. The American Artists Association turns up in a prescient account of the Art-­Union’s downfall, almost a year before it happened, in Whitney’s Republic. Whitney described the opposition to the Art-­Union as a large body of artists who met in Freemasons Hall in New York and who wanted a system for promoting art that would be American in character, founded on principles of justice and equality, and aiming solely to develop subjects illustrative of the 41

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country’s history, landscape, and poetry. The article names only a few members of the supposedly large body, but it’s an interesting group. George Inness is today one of the best known, as an admired landscape painter and a follower of land reformer Henry George. But his name was in the newspapers before his landscapes began attracting much attention. When studying art in Rome, he was arrested for refusing to take off his hat in front of the pope, and Lewis Cass, the American ambassador and a defender of Protestantism in Europe, bailed him out. John Vanderlyn is also well known today as a history painter; when the artists’ group first met, he had recently (in 1846) completed a Columbus painting for the Capitol in Washington. His picture had not received anywhere near the critical approval that Leutze got; in fact, many critics were hostile to its staginess.3 Of the lesser-­known artists mentioned in the article (historical painter George W. Flagg, landscapist De Witt Clinton Boutelle, Gilbert L. Haight), Haight might have been of particular interest to the Republic’s readers in the Order of United Americans. As the Republic observed, OUA member Joseph Haight owned an American temperance grocery; temperance advocates often had nativist sentiments, as both movements were based in evangelical Protestantism. And Gilbert L. Haight of Brooklyn was noticed elsewhere in the Republic as a scribe.4 But it was probably Walcutt’s involvement that led to the Republic’s support for the new organization. That Ohio artists like Walcutt took a leading role in antebellum cooperative movements is not surprising. Ohio and New York were both centers for market capitalism, which more than immigration was eroding the value of being a skilled artisan, a role that was still in the 1840s not very far removed from the artist. Since the eighteenth century, the artisan had been a crucial force in American republican ideology, which asserted that he as much as the aristocratic landholder could be an independent (voting) citizen, because he did have property: his skill was his property. In cities like New York and Cincinnati, markets (or the capital needed for producing for expanded markets) were if not ending that work-­based independence, then at least making it much riskier. Fraternal associations and trade associations in response both tried to reconstruct the character of the artisan workshop, especially its reliance on a fraternal bond, and to revive its social impact, including as a safety net. 5 In her valuable study of fraternal associations, Mary Ann Clawson demonstrates that the older artisanal household, with its patriarch or master and its apprentices, servants, and children, was a corporate entity greater than any one member—the members shared interests. Fraternal and trade associations similarly promised to advance individual interests of members while preserving social solidarity. Rituals of initiation or even just the vote to admit someone

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served as a baptism to bring someone in as a member of a family. And that family, or brotherhood, like the idealized nuclear family, was a place where market values did not reign or where one could find some compensation and protection from competition.6 It’s not surprising, then, that the Know-­Nothings as a political party that sought a base among artisans organized members into lodges like the fraternal orders, or that Walcutt and his fellow artists contributed to publications of the Order of United Americans, just as they did to Odd Fellow newspapers. The shared languages of these brotherhoods may explain why the Odd Fellows themselves became increasingly known as a Protestant order, with prominent Know-­Nothings as members. At one court trial in Ohio, two members of the Odd Fellows who had infiltrated an Irish club accused of subversive activities were asked by the defense to show the secret signs of membership of both the American Protestant Association (an arm of the Know-­Nothings) and the Odd Fellows.7 The rhetoric of common interests, brotherhood, and preservation of the republic that bridged these organizations was not so different from that of the voluntary art associations Walcutt and his friends founded. The American Artists’ Association, for example, was a cooperative gallery. If the American Art-­Union was run by rich merchants who selected art for exhibition and determined how much money to pay artists, the artist-­run AAA would put on exhibitions and sell art for the benefit of its members, fellow artists. As one sympathetic newspaper—its editors were Odd Fellows— described it, getting in digs at the Art-­Union’s practices, this association would not purchase artworks by the score from a few favorite painters or buy single pictures at extravagant prices to attract subscribers.8 Instead, every artist who joined would have his pictures exhibited in rotation, and if his peers deem any of them worth $50 or more, the work will be purchased, with prices capped at $500, to give all a fair chance at the patronage. Members of the artist-­run National Academy of Design, which limited membership by elections and charged for exhibitions, gave the new organization their approval: Academy president Asher Durand showed a painting at their first exhibition, future Academy president Daniel Huntington gave a speech, and Academy members turned up “en masse.” Walcutt, as president of the new organization, gave a speech on art’s origin in the innate sentiment of a people or civilization—an idea that stressed not original individual genius, but national, racial, or group character. It was also idealist in the sense that the concept of a feeling that belongs to all the people in a place is an abstract one. His concrete examples of this feeling were all ancient ruins, from Egypt to Ohio mounds, artworks that have to be literally dug up from the dirt; he hovered on the edge of saying that a country and its “national” culture are tied to the

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soil.9 This was getting close to the Know-­Nothing position that only native-­ born, not adopted, citizens can feel true patriotism for their country. The American Artists’ Association was fairly short-­lived. The New York Herald wished it well but thought as early as January 1852 that it was struggling. There was discussion within the group of giving assistance to artists’ widows and orphans, as per fraternal associations like the Odd Fellows, and supporting poor or superannuated artists from the proceeds of the artists’ cooperative or “joint stock” gallery. But funds were insufficient, so benefits were limited to participants.10 Walcutt wrote to the papers to reinforce the message that all artists who joined would be received on the same footing, and all would share in the benefits. The Association did, however, have a “prize” system for distributing artworks, and in the wake of the downfall of the Art-­Union on the grounds of its illegal lottery, the idea of gambling on art may have undercut the AAA’s claims to legitimacy, too. One of Walcutt’s contributions to the Association’s exhibition and coffers, The Gambler, was a dramatic historical scene of a losing hand.11 The loss of Walcutt’s leadership as president when he left for Europe in August 1852 (with commissions in hand for nearly ten historical paintings) also probably hurt the AAA. Nor did T. D. Jones, a director, stay in the city. The remaining AAA officers—Sketch Club members John C. Hagen (secretary), Arthur F. Tait (director), plus James Burns (vice president), William Hamilton (treasurer), and Ambrose Andrews, John Williamson, and John T. Bush (directors)—may not have had the Ohioans’ connections.12 Tait, a working-­class English artist, would become a very successful specialist in hunting pictures, including those of heroic woodsmen like those Walcutt painted, but he had only arrived in 1850. Scotsman John Williamson was also a relative newcomer to exhibiting art in the city. New Yorker Hagen had a long record of exhibiting genre paintings and portraits (including one of F. A. Chapman) at the National Academy, and social connections to New York’s transcendentalists, but that group was not particularly active on behalf of workers. The others had a skimpier exhibition history: Andrews was a miniaturist from New England who had painted Texas senator Sam Houston (who would later endorse American Party principles). Bush had sold a few pictures to the Art-­Union, and Burns was mostly known for a giant painting of George Washington as the leader of international democratic revolutions.13 Walcutt’s Sketch Club, begun before the Artists’ Association, was a more successful but less public organization. Since the 1820s there had been a prestigious sketch club in New York whose members, the city’s most famous artists and poets, met in each other’s homes, a practice that reinforced its social exclusivity. Not only was it unattainable for young artists from Ohio,

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but when Walcutt got to the city, it was in the midst of being transformed into the Century Club, an even more elite group of 100 members. Walcutt’s Sketch Club, by contrast, included panorama painters, illustrators, theatrical painters, bohemians like T. D. Jones (who wore a wide-­brimmed slouch hat and a gray shawl around his shoulders like a Roman mantle), actors, poets, reporters, and humorists.14 It mostly met at the artists’ studios, but occasionally at C. D. Stuart’s house, the home of the father of actress Julia Dean, or the Reverend Burchard’s home. That artists’ parents were involved is a reminder of how young they all were. The size of the Ohio contingent and the significant number of émigré artists further suggest the need for personal support in the metropolis in the absence of extended families. The Sketch Club, like the artists’ cooperative association, had a principle of mutuality at its base. The “benefits” in Walcutt’s Sketch Clubs lay in the host (who provided refreshments and a meeting space) receiving all the attending artists’ sketches on a given topic. Such collections of drawings, like albums and scrapbooks, memorialized the social networks as well as the aesthetic kinship of the members.15 The host was not always the same person as the owner of the spot for the meeting, the location of which was announced in the newspapers. Most often it was in a studio, especially since several of the most active members shared studio space or worked in adjacent rooms.16 This workshop arrangement was convenient, as quite a few of the artists collaborated on panoramas, books, and periodicals, often with engravers like the Orr brothers. Participants in return received food, poetry, song, and camaraderie, as well as friendly feedback from other artists. In Walcutt’s clubs, like the fraternities, new members had to be voted in and had to be willing to contribute “dues” in the form of sketches. There were none of the usual rituals and special attire that routinely helped bond brothers in secret orders. The New York Sketch Club nevertheless featured song, poetry, and satire, though the co-­ed meetings may have lacked the freedom of the informal gatherings of bohemian literati at Pfaff’s beer hall, or the more conservative all-­male literati at Windust’s saloon, neither of which officially selected members, of course. Nor were Walcutt’s clubs a secret. Sketch Club meetings were regularly covered in several newspapers, often by correspondents who were honorary (literary rather than art) members. Yet in their structure and demeanor, like the fraternal orders, Sketch Clubs capitalized on a brotherly, artisanal ethos. That comradely tone is evident in the Sketch Club’s vote to send a tribute of esteem to the family of Düsseldorf painter Johann Hasenclever after news arrived of his death. John Savage, an Irish nationalist and poet, and Cornelius Mathews, a satirist and novelist, wrote the tribute, and T. D. Jones composed

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the condolences to the family. Hasenclever was not as well-­known as Düsseldorf’s famous history and landscape painters, like Karl Friedrich Lessing and Andreas Achenbach, but he was very sympathetic to the Young Germany democratic revolutions of 1848 and their goal of an expanded franchise. His studio scene of 1836 conjures not a portrait of a lonely genius, but a sense of brother artists joined in a shared effort, a spirit that must have appealed to the Sketch Club artists (fig. 19). The artists in Hasenclever’s Studio, with their convivial pipes and palettes, if they do not entirely reject the classical past, nevertheless appear firmly dedicated to painting the ordinary people and manners of the present. Hasenclever and his genre-­painting colleagues were to some extent outsiders in the prestigious Düsseldorf Academy, and as it may have done for Walcutt and his friends, some of the spirit of companionship comes from that position. Though his sketch is lost, Ohio illustrator John McLenan, who would provide cartoons for engraver T. W. Strong’s Know-­Nothing Almanac, also sketched Walcutt’s club members at dinner.17 Journalist friends, attending as

Figure 19. Johann Hasenclever, Studio Scene, 1836, oil on canvas, 28.3 × 34.6 inches. Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf. Public domain; image provided by Google Art Project and Wikimedia Commons.

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honorary members, described meetings as filled with the happy power of social enjoyment, waggery, and songs and enlivened by the gorgeous glowing enthusiasm of poems, toasts, cheers, burlesques, pranks, and parodies. Ohio editor and playwright Charles Gayler, who edited Strong’s Young America (to which McLenan also contributed), wrote “A Night with the Sketch Club,” in which he called the members the “b’hoys,” a slang term that suggested their affiliation with the (working-­class) firemen and artisans of New York. Gayler also wrote a Sketch Club song that humorously suggested the pleasures of drinking and men and women singing together. Gayler’s pointing out a portrait of the Virgin and Child among the club’s decorations (along with busts of Clay and Webster) helped set it apart from more raucous taverns.18 Perhaps because they met in private locations, Walcutt’s art clubs mixed the sexes, and a few women who were professional artists or writers were permitted to become members. The brotherly feeling stemming from a shared workshop, and even the convivial drinking of artisans, survived, albeit adapted to a more “respectable” private space. The native-­born members of the Sketch Club, many of whom were from New England, shared Anglo-­Saxon and Protestant ancestry. But unlike the nativist fraternities, immigrants, if not many Catholics, were also members of the Sketch Club. Like the population of New York City itself, a significant proportion of the club was foreign-­born, mostly from Britain or Germany. There was no discrimination against Irish members, and Irish Protestants were active members. Native-­born Irish Protestant painter James H. Cafferty, a visitor to the Burchards, was a founder and president. Member and immigrant Eliza Greatorex was the daughter of an Irish Methodist preacher.19 Defenders of Irish Catholics in the U.S. also joined, like the journalist John Savage and the Protestant actor John Brougham, both immigrants from Ireland. The subjects for the group’s sketches, while almost always from British literature (Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, Goldsmith, Campbell, Coleridge, Byron, Moore, Thomson, plus American Joseph Rodman Drake) or the Bible, often had a humanitarian, allegorical, or spiritual flavor, like “Hope.” The club’s preference for British authors points not only to the group’s sense of inheriting and transmitting a magnificent Anglo-­American culture, but also to a version of cultural nationalism that sought to translate what they believed were universal human ideals into an American idiom. The shared love of English literature itself created a bond, assimilating the diverse members of the group, as something that belonged to all of them.20 How sympathetic Sketch Club artists were to recent and Catholic immigrants in their art is debatable. John Brougham certainly was. He wrote patriotic Revolutionary dramas with Irish men and women as characters

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(including one on the death of General Warren at Bunker Hill) and topical burlesques with present-­day immigrants like Life in New York (1856).21 Charles F. Blauvelt, a longtime member who shared studios with Cafferty, specialized in portraits of German immigrants. In one, a man asks direction from a Black woodchopper (fig. 20). In choosing that seemingly loaded moment, Blauvelt isn’t necessarily admiring their alliance; arguably he may be criticizing German immigrants’ willingness to take political direction from or join antislavery parties, just as Brougham’s paper suggested the exploitation of Irish labor was worse than that of Black labor. At any rate, the pro-­Compromise New York Herald found Blauvelt’s painting comic, rather than troubling.22 Blauvelt also painted Irish patriot, Catholic Democrat, editor, and eventual Union Army officer Thomas F. Meagher. But Blauvelt’s work, which appeared in the Odd Fellows’ annuals, did not horrify nativists, especially ones who supported foreign liberation movements. The Meagher portrait was noticed by the Evening Mirror, which was solidly nativist. That newspaper regularly mentioned Blauvelt, along with Walcutt, Cafferty, Tait, Richards, John Hagen, and Jacob Blondell (who also painted Meagher), and others of this group in its round-­up of artists’ doings. Copway’s American Indian, a journal that allied itself with Whitney’s Republic, admired Blauvelt’s designs for a painting of the first vote of an adopted (immigrant) citizen and for a scene of the great liberator and Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth leaving Europe. The Cosmopolitan Art Journal, which had a strongly Protestant point of view, described

Figure 20. Charles Felix Blauvelt, A German Immigrant Inquiring His Way, 1855, oil on canvas, 36 1/8 × 29 inches, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina. Public domain; image provided by Google Arts and Culture.

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Blauvelt painting “Luther reading the Bible at Urfurth Convent” before switching for commercial reasons to “Paddy-­f rom- ­Cork-­just-­arrived-­be-­ Judy.”23 Perhaps the comic element of Blauvelt’s style minimized the significance of his portrayal of immigrants as future citizens, just as it did for Brougham’s plays. In a sense, the politics of club members was conservative, despite their eagerness for liberation movements abroad to succeed. As the presence of Webster and Clay busts as club decorations indicates, members were devoted to preserving the existing Union (not unlike the Know-­Nothings), which made them slow to embrace new (immigrant, Catholic) voters or abolitionism. For well-­educated Irish elites, alliances with the dominant Protestant culture were a path to political effectiveness and a mark of social prestige distinguishing them from working-­class immigrants. John Savage might serve as an example. A Catholic whose Episcopalian wife attended the Sketch Club as a guest, he supported the Irish nationalist cause in his writings and edited a Stephen Douglas (Democratic—advocating popular sovereignty to resolve slavery in the West) newspaper in Washington until war broke out, when he joined the Union army.24 So too, after secession, nativist editors like Erastus Brooks of the New York Express, who had supported the Constitutional Union Party rather than join the antislavery Republicans, helped organize a mass Union pro-­war meeting in New York. The Sketch Club itself was not nativist, then, or even anti-­Catholic, but members who were could find common ground with the others in a shared mistrust of Romanism, or what was seen as the pope’s political influence not just in Italy, but in Ireland, Europe, and the U.S. Both evangelical Protestants and Irish nationalists saw democratic uprisings in Ireland, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Italy as aimed at least in part against the Catholic Church, a view that let them frame their support for these revolutions within a broader criticism of the church’s influence on its followers, even in the U.S. Both constituencies, anticlerical nationalists and devout Protestants, believed that the pope in Rome was in cahoots with repressive governments to crush liberation movements of the people. They also argued that bishops in the U.S. supported that despotic aim and that the church hierarchy in the U.S. exercised untoward influence over Catholic voters. Irish nationalist and journalist John Mitchel, who attended an occasional Sketch Club meeting, like Savage, Brougham, Meagher, and the papers they edited, were at odds with the official organs of the Catholic Church in New York just as much as Whitney’s Republic.25 Unquestionably the club supported the mission of Young America, or Young Ireland, or Young Germany, to expand democratic and individual

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rights. Something of the spirit of the Odd Fellows, the ideal of a brotherhood advancing democratic American ideals internationally, is evident in the Sketch Club’s passion for overturning tyrants. Most of them, including Walcutt, signed a petition in support of Young Hungary’s liberator (and Protestant) Louis Kossuth, and Sketch Club artists seem in fact to have organized the initiative.26 At the same time, members, even when immigrants themselves, were ready to see the pope, and those who proselytized for the church, as a danger to American liberty. Edmund Farrenc, a French editor who celebrated Young America ideals in literature and attended the Sketch Club, wrote the anti-­Jesuit Carlotina and the Sanfedesti in 1853.27 Sketch Club artists worked with their brother authors on projects that had a similarly anticlerical but pro-­ liberation bent. Jacob Dallas illustrated one of W. W. Fosdick’s books of poetry, which had lines like: “And Rome shall yet be Rome!— / When her superstitious tyrants, / Sink ’neath oblivion’s sea / Then from the Tiber’s foam shall rise / The goddess Liberty!” Dallas also illustrated screeds by Odd Fellow C. E. Lester, including his Life of Sam Houston (engraved by Nathaniel Orr and published in 1855, the same year Houston endorsed Native American principles), and his Jesuits in Our Homes (Stringer & Townsend, 1855). Dallas also contributed to Sketch Club visitor and workingman’s poet A. J. H. Duganne’s anti-­Catholic Tenant House (DeWitt, 1857).28 Sketch Club authors who worked with Walcutt, like editor, Odd Fellow, and Republic contributor C. D. Stuart, Cornelius Mathews, and Charles Burkhardt, would also fit this category of those who did not object to immigrants per se, but who classed the pope with other tyrants. There was a fine line between this view and anti-­Catholicism. Because nativist feeling was often based in fraternalism, both its sense of brotherhood and its exclusionary character, it could find voice in infinitely more tolerant and liberal associations than the Order of United Americans. The Odd Fellows’ principle, for example, was Friendship, Love, and Truth, underwritten by God and the American flag, and they in theory accepted members of any religion. But like the OUA, which did not officially bar Catholics, the Odd Fellows ended up primarily Protestant. This was partly because the Catholic Church was understandably actively hostile to all secret societies, with their special passwords and rites, and discouraged joining. But benevolent fraternities had other exclusions, explicit and implicit, that resembled those of the nativist orders. The Improved Order of Red Men did not admit Native Americans, and the American Odd Fellows (founded in Baltimore) and the Masons had separate African American branches.29 The Order of the United Americans was segregated. All of these groups excluded women, though like the Odd Fellows, which created a category for members’ wives, Whitney encouraged women to contribute, and female auxiliaries to the

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OUA were formed.30 Mrs. Orr, the wife of Whitney’s favorite engraver, Odd Fellow Nathaniel Orr, wrote extensively for Odd Fellow papers. It’s natural that the highly patriotic mottos for the two organizations—e pluribus unum for the OUA and Amicitia, Amor et Veritas (just below “In God We Trust”) for the Odd Fellows—in their respective journals were carried by a flying, armed eagle, bearing the Stars and Stripes (see fig. 10).31 Walcutt’s Sketch Clubs too had only white, Christian members. Women were members, but often, like Mrs. Orr, they were relatives—wives, daughters, sisters—of the male members. And like the resemblances between Odd Fellow and OUA iconography, the productions of Sketch Club artists mapped nativist, or Protestant, exclusions onto the rhetoric of brotherhood. Rembrandt Lockwood’s Last Judgement (lost), which was exhibited to the public in 1854, is one example.32 Lockwood’s painting was not a conventional or biblically faithful Last Judgment. It was a gigantic (17½ feet x 27 feet) canvas featuring George Washington’s ascent to heaven, the crushing of slavery (personified by a white woman), and many other (1,500 in total) allegorical figures. Walcutt presided at the opening reception, joined by the editor of the nativist True American, and the picture was endorsed by an Episcopalian minister active in the Sunday School movement, who probably was asked because he had authored a popular life of George Washington, one that would later be revised by Benson Lossing. They were joined by a Democratic supreme court justice and a Protestant Irish nationalist.33 All agreed that Lockwood’s work marked a new epoch in the history of American art; their unanimity underscored once again the cultural agreement between nativists, evangelical Protestants, and fomenters of international democratic revolutions. Indeed, Lockwood’s painting may have resembled in some respects the grandiloquent allegorical portrayal of Washington Crowned by Equality, Fraternity and Liberty painted by American Artists’ Association officer James Burns. Burns’s picture was commissioned by a defender of immigrants who praised the U.S. as a “holy brotherhood” and who advocated for extending its republican union to England and Ireland.34 Lockwood’s painting, which followed the custom of charging for entry to see a large morally and visually ambitious canvas, was covered extensively by America’s Own, the newspaper that supported the nativist Order of United American Mechanics. The editor of America’s Own had married Rembrandt’s sister, Fanny. But it was also praised by the Republic, Sun, Express, Sunday Dispatch (likely by Sketch Club writer Charles Burkhardt), and Evening Mirror, all of which had Sketch Club honorary members and Odd Fellows as editors and all of which had expressed nativist (anti-­immigrant or anti-­ Catholic) views. Walcutt knew Lockwood personally, because Lockwood had

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exhibited a bust of Genevieve in Walcutt’s studio in 1849. In what was probably Walcutt’s review of the Last Judgment for the Republic, “W” describes how Lockwood introduces a native American race. The artist brings the different races of men together for judgment in the foreground: the Caucasian, Mongolian (“Asiatic”), Ethiopian (“Negro”), American Indian (“Red Indian”), and Malayan (“Maylay”), with the Caucasian embracing her sister, the Mongolian, all on a level. Another Sketch Club writer added that at their side is Religion, crowned and rising (Oppression has a shattered crown).35 Lockwood’s choice of races was, like the painting itself, not especially biblical, but it was American in suggesting that the continent had fostered its own race of men. When Walcutt’s friend, the deeply religious artist Jesse Talbot, did his version of the subject of the fate of the races, the Sons of Noah, he kept to the more traditional divisions of Asia (the Assyrians), Africa (Egypt), and Europe (Greek) for the races. This still lent itself to Protestant interpretation. The Presbyterian minister who provided the narrative for Talbot’s pictured creation of the races was an anti-­Catholic activist who especially feared the influence of “Papists” in the Western states.36 Lockwood’s allegory instead followed what the Evening Mirror called modern “received ethnological divisions” that gave a place to the Americas in creating a distinct race, something often stressed by those who privileged native birth as key to citizenship. Whether this modern ethnological progress, as conceived by Lockwood, embraced a common humanity or represented a divinely instituted hierarchy among the peoples of the earth may have depended on the viewer. The Independent, an evangelical and antislavery publication (editors included Henry Ward Beecher), endorsed Lockwood’s Last Judgment, and Talbot’s painting, too. The Evening Mirror added that Lockwood’s astonishingly expansive composition was superior to Michelangelo’s in excluding the intolerant conceits of the Catholic Church.37 Lockwood’s Last Judgment was Protestant and American. The result was that when Lockwood started an art school, nativist newspapers could hail studying there as a chance to become “American in our art as well as in our politics.”38 It’s not surprising, then, that contributors to Whitney’s Republic, to Odd Fellows’ literature, to Young America papers, and to the Sketch Club overlapped. The honorary members of the New York Sketch Club, who regularly gave comic speeches, read their poetry, and hosted the meetings, included Republic mainstay C. D. Stuart; lawyer W. W. Fosdick, a backer of Know-­ Nothing candidate George Law; T. B. Thorpe, artist and coauthor of the “glory” or the “fall” (because of Catholic immigrants) of The Model Republic; playwright, editor, novelist, and Episcopalian Cornelius Mathews, active in the Know-­Nothing Party; Charles Burkhardt, nativist critic at the Sunday

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Dispatch; poet, labor activist, and American Party politician A. J. H. Duganne; and critics from the nativist Express and Sunday Times—the latter a paper where Thomas R. Whitney had worked in the 1840s. An idealized community, where professionals, poets, artists, and artisans found brotherhood and a common devotion to humanitarian and democratic reform, was realized in these voluntary associations and their publications. In this milieu celebrating a native American art aimed at a popular audience, the ideas of the Order of United Americans were not really on the fringes; they were lodged in the center.

3

Native Americans and the West

Walcutt’s career resembled those of his peers in a certain eclecticism. His bread and butter was portraits, painted and sculpted, but he did “western” pictures of woodsmen and Indians, contemporary and historical genre scenes, historical paintings mostly of the Revolutionary era, and, if his illustrations are included, fairy drawings and allegorical tableaus. These seemingly disparate subjects, however, can be traced to Walcutt’s involvement, often via fraternal groups, with intersecting circles of nativists, Young America advocates, abolitionists, and spiritualists. His “western art” is most surprising in this regard, as few scholars have considered the mythic West and its heroic pioneers as a location for the production of nativist ideology in this early period.1 But it may be possible to do just that. For example, Walcutt published a short story, “Joel Wetsel: A Story of the Backwoods,” in Whitney’s Republic, and illustrated “Wetsel, the Indian Hunter,” in the American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum a year later (fig. 21). His own hero, Joel, is based on Lewis Wetzel, as the conflation of Joel with the Odd Fellows’ account of Lewis in the published illustration (see the inset title on the engraving) indicates. Lewis Wetzel was a criminal frontiersman in the colonial era whose claim to fame was his monomaniacal hatred of Indians, including killing them while sleeping, which was translated by his biographers into romantic daring and stirring adventure by a “free man of the forest.” Walcutt in his fictionalized character Joel similarly creates a natural nobleman, a man whose bravery and cleverness were the result of his love for and origins in the Ohio wilderness. Walcutt had sent poems to the Republic about his devotion to his native home, where his forefathers, about whom he also often wrote for the Republic, had died. Walcutt in the short story does not 54

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Figure 21. William Walcutt, “Joel Wetsel,” American Odd-Fellows’ Museum (New York: Edward Walker, 1856), 285. Public domain; image provided by author. The illustration also appeared in the Odd-Fellows’ Offering for 1853 (New York: Edward Walker, 1852), 260.

compare Joel to American Indians, his fellow inhabitants of the wilderness, but to another, richer white woodsman. The fictional anecdote centers on their shooting competition, a subject he would return to in a later painting.2 In his story, the wealthy trader, after losing the contest, tries to induce Joel to marry his daughter, but Joel stays with Sally Ann, his gun, suggesting that this “type” of backwoodsman was destined to disappear even as domestic, commercially oriented civilization advanced. In Walcutt’s illustration for the Odd Fellows’ narrative about Lewis Wetzel, the white man’s Indian foes, armed only with bow and arrow, are hardly present, perhaps because Walcutt had initially meant the picture to show Joel winning the shooting contest. They are small background figures who crumple and fall, mere foils for Wetzel’s astonishing dynamism in the dark forest, reloading as he runs and nearly cartwheeling. John McRae, Walcutt’s engraver, had experience conveying such energies. He translated Tompkins Matteson’s similarly dramatic illustrations for the Odd Fellows, including Matteson’s more statically posed, but expressively doomed, “last of the race” Indians, and went on to publish many engravings set among heroic forefathers

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of the colonial era (see fig. 28). Wetsel and Wetzel both, in their proximity to and contrast with American Indians and the massive American forest, are true Americans. It is their very pleasure in killing and shooting, acts supposedly natural to the wilderness (Wetzel scalped his victims), that indicates that the white man, like the Indian, does them from necessity—their nature— rather than pay. This in turn marks them as naturally (nature-­produced) American characters.3 The Republic featured western stories like this, with dialect, because such men were real Americans, allied both with urban artisans and conservatives in resisting the market (and the corresponding influx of cheap immigrant labor). Or as Walcutt put it patriotically in that journal, describing the Kentucky rifleman, “So long as thousands and thousands of rifles remain in the hands of the people . . . so long as there is a great proportion of the republic who live free as the wild Indian . . . knowing no law but that of right . . . America is unconquerable,” and all the invading armies of the world cannot “subdue the free-­souled hunter amongst the mountains, and great prairies, and mighty rivers of the West.”4 One reason Walcutt wrote so much for the Republic during its two years of existence was that he was saving money to travel to London and Paris. That travel would produce a painting with a frontiersman shown in a rather different style than Wetsel. The trip was important to developing his thinking about how to show American heroism, and perhaps affected his views of immigrants, too. His travel journal—probably written for his family—offers some insight into his views of both religion and immigration. On the ship bound for London, he got into long debates with an atheist about divine providence in which he argued strongly for the active role of God in nature and in human affairs. The sailor, his opponent in the debate, did not perceive sufficient harmony in nature for a divine creator. Walcutt in the dispute relied on reason, offering scientific proofs of why the earth was round, but he most often thought of nature as allegorically epitomizing moral truths. In a description of a shark and a pilot fish, he interpreted the pilot fish as enslaved, as in a Persian or Arabian tale, and wanted to free it from his lordship the shark.5 If Walcutt cheerfully argued about religion with a white British sailor who was a fellow passenger, he avoided the Germans in steerage, who he described as all dirt and grease (and one German cabin passenger as unwashed and miserable). Yet at the same time, in reviewing the course of American history (inspired by his last glimpse of shore), he emphasized that the pioneers who chopped down the mighty forests to open millions of acres to the sun (and so to the farmer) had made it a land of perfect liberty and an asylum for the world’s oppressed. Surely those oppressed included (at least Protestant) Germans, some of whom he knew from his Sketch Club. At the same time, his

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musings emphasized his relationship to his destination, England, the birthplace of American freedom, the land from which his own land was sprung, where his free sires learned the great and holy truth (liberty) that still inspired him. He noted that he wore his Kossuth hat (sold by hatmaker John Genin, a conservative Democratic candidate for city council in 1855, who by 1857 was a member of the nativist party) to greet England, a gesture that might suggest he saw himself as more progressive than the fatherland. While in England, he interviewed sailors at Greenwich who had fought against his father in 1812, perhaps as part of his research for future paintings. But if Protestant divinity and Anglo-­American liberty were clearly aligned for him on the voyage out, on the ship home he contentedly shared a room with an Irish artist traveling in the entourage of the Catholic bishop of New Mexico and sketched a portrait of that bishop, with whom he had long conversations.6 The effect of travel is especially evident in his reconstruction of the western nobleman. From Wetsel, the almost comical frontiersman—not unlike the character created by one of Walcutt’s sitters, the Yankee actor Dan Marble, who portrayed the Niagara-­leaping Sam Patch—the natural nobleman moved to a more ideal realm, where human power is still identified with nature, but without the exaggeration and humor.7 His source for the reconception was Barbizon artist Jean-­François Millet, who had just done an unusual (for him) painting of an Ohio pioneer (fig. 22). While he was in France, he copied Millet’s painting. Millet is known for his role in developing Realism, particularly for French peasants, who emerge in his paintings as monumental while still marked by the signs of labor and poverty. This avoidance of idealization while creating nonetheless powerful working-­class men and women was an achievement that must have attracted the print dealers Goupil & Co. The international firm commissioned Karl Bodmer and Millet for its projected series, the “Annals of U.S. History Illustrated: The Pioneers” (fig. 23).8 American history, as the history of a republic, must have seemed suited to just such characterization as Millet could provide. Bodmer already had substantial credentials as a painter of American Indians. Millet’s painting came to be called Mazeppa Américain, a title that refers to an 1819 poem by Lord Byron. In Byron’s poem, the Ukrainian folk hero Ivan Mazeppa’s terrible suffering, as he is tied to a wild horse running across the steppes, “thus bound in nature’s nakedness,” is explained by Providence. From this ordeal, which brings Mazeppa close to death, he is chosen to return, to have his revenge on the king, and to lead the struggle for Ukrainian independence. By mid-­century, this Romantic story of a noble Cossack could fit a Realist program of empowering ordinary (close to nature) men who fight for political freedom. It was popular enough in the U.S. that in 1846 Nathaniel

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Figure 22. Jean-François Millet, Mazeppa Américain, 1851, crayon and gouache on paper, 14 × 21 inches, Musée Thomas-­Henry, Cherbourg-­ Octeville, France. Public domain; image ­provided by Arte: Uno sguardo alla pittura delXIX secolo e del primo ’900.

Figure 23. Karl Bodmer, Simon Butler, The American Mazeppa, ­lithograph, 14 × 21 inches. Paris: Printed by Lemercier, for Goupil & Co., 1851, copyrighted in New York by William Schaus, 1852. Bodmer’s series of western lithographs included a scene from Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. Public domain; image provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Currier did a color lithograph of Byron’s naked hero, surrounded by a band of rather concerned wild horses. And Adah Isaacs Menken, whose only connection to Walcutt was an affair with one of his friends, made the equestrian role a famous symbol of women’s freedom, too.9 The “American Mazeppa,” the historical subject of the Goupil commission, fit the Byronic profile at least to the extent of a dangerous stint on horseback. He was Simon Kenton, known in Kentucky as Simon Butler, an Ohio pioneer whose feats as a brutal killer in the eighteenth century almost rivaled Lewis Wetzel’s. Cecil Hartley, who wrote the first biography of Wetzel, also described Kenton, including one version of his “death-­ride”: the horse thief was beaten and bound (clothed) to a horse, while his American Indian captors returned with him to their village. Other accounts suggested that the horse was wild and was sent running with Kenton on his back through the woods. Either way, his “ride” evoked the Ukrainian folk story; his survival was evidence of manifest destiny.10 Kenton’s home was in Ohio, not far from Columbus, and Walcutt almost certainly knew the tale from his friendship with the Ohio editor and politician Donn Piatt. Piatt was a great admirer of Kenton. In an effort to secure a statue of Kenton by a different Ohio artist for the state capitol, Piatt presented him as a founding father who should be imitated by the present generation, an idea that suggests the Democrat shared typically negative views of American Indians who stood in the way of expansion. Piatt, who devoured Cooper’s romantic books of the frontier, which reminded him of a “time when one loved the Mohegans,” even suggested that Kenton had been the source for Byron’s heroic Mazeppa.11 Millet reworked earlier portrayals of the Ukrainian by Eugène Delacroix and Horace Vernet (figs. 24, 25).12 Delacroix’s picture, painted at a repressive political moment during the restoration of the French monarchy, does not point to a hopeful outcome for the representative of liberation. Alienation from society leads to death, even for the strongest and wildest. Horse and rider are, grimly, one. Despite the addition of wolves, Vernet’s version is sweeter, because it is so much more polished, in the more neoclassical style associated with the French state and its favored artists. Vernet’s Mazeppa seems more delicate, his pose sexier, closer to that of Europa, the mythological heroine kidnapped by Jupiter in the guise of a bull. Mortal women who are loved by the powerful gods find bliss in the end, and Vernet’s quotation of these Renaissance-­era models softens the bleakness of Mazeppa’s plight. Goupil represented Vernet, who was much admired in the United States. His design was the basis for Currier’s hero, as well as for a decorative panel for a fire engine belonging to New York’s Mazeppa Hose Company. The fire engine and its decorations were painted in crimson, carmine, gold, lilac, and

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Figure 24. Eugène Delacroix, Mazeppa on the Dying Horse, 1824, gouache on paper, 8.8 × 12.2 inches, Finnish National Gallery. Public domain; image provided by Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 25. Horace Vernet, Mazeppa and the Wolves, 1826, oil on canvas, 38.1 × 53.5 inches, Musée Calvet. Public domain; image provided by Wikimedia Commons.

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plum; its richness won it a medal at the 1851 New York Mechanics’ Fair. The male nude, even in this powerless position, could stand for the heroic working-­ class masculinity epitomized by New York’s volunteer firefighters. Mazeppa was joined on the engine by a panel featuring firemen in action, while yet another linked the firemen’s valor to the founding fathers, with a scene of Washington at Valley Forge.13 Other fire companies similarly had panels with Washington’s Inauguration, portraits of the stalwart actor Edwin Forrest (known for his “western” roles), and Perry’s 1813 victory on Lake Erie. The effect was not unlike the mastheads on workingmen’s papers, which paired powerful workers with their Revolutionary ancestors. Millet swaps American Indians for Vernet’s menacing wolves, keeping an external if still “natural” threat to the civilized hero, rather than Delacroix’s identification of the hero with (blasted) nature. But he retains more of Delacroix’s quality of isolation and despair, even though in Millet, as in Vernet, hero and horse are still very much alive. Indeed, all four hooves of the horse are off the ground in the classic rocking horse position, and the American Mazeppa, unlike the Ukrainian, seems to be struggling to get free.14 For the lithograph, Karl Bodmer, a Swiss-­French Protestant artist known best for his employment by Protestant prince Maximilian of Wied to document North American tribes, added details of clothing and ornament to all the men, but especially to the Indians, who become more interesting and prominent in the lithograph, albeit no less stereotyped. Simon Kenton (Butler) was relatively obscure, compared to Daniel Boone or the “pioneers” from J. F. Cooper’s novels who formed Bodmer’s other subjects in the Goupil print series. His ride, bound to a horse, was undoubtedly why Millet and Bodmer turned to Mazeppa imagery. But it might be noted that the Ukrainian Mazeppa, like other Cossack leaders trying to win independence, was allied in both real life and in Byron’s poem with Swiss and Protestant rulers against Catholic Poland’s court. In the popular Anglo-­ American stage play based on his exploits, rather than leading an uprising, the Orientalist hero’s ride into the wilderness restores him to his rightful place as a Tartar prince, and he returns to Catholic Poland at the head of an army.15 Perhaps for American audiences, who like Walcutt were prepared to see enslaved fish rebelling against their shark lords, western nature was sufficiently exotic to recall the steppes. Bodmer’s ethnographic details help transfer this quality of the fabulous (allegorical) Orient to the Kentucky wilderness and its noblemen. Walcutt, in Paris by September of 1852, may have known both the print and Millet’s original design. Kentuckians mentioned seeing the latter in the Louvre, and Walcutt went to the museum not only to copy masterpieces but

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Figure 26. William Walcutt, Simon Kenton’s Death-Ride, 1859, oil on canvas, 57 × 83 inches, Kentucky Historical Society. Public domain; image provided by the Kentucky Historical Society.

on a commission to copy a portrait of Henry Clay, painted by American artist G. P. A. Healy, for the Kentucky Historical Society. Walcutt’s Death-­Ride of Simon Kenton may also have been a commission for the Historical Society, which is the painting’s current owner (fig. 26).16 Certainly, compared to “Joel Wetsel,” the Death-­Ride shows his absorption of classical models (see fig. 21). Walcutt had enrolled in Paris in life drawing classes with Beaux-­Arts painter Adolphe Yvon and mastered enough of the academic technique to win a bronze medal for his clay model of a Bengal tiger from the Jardin des Plantes. If modeling a tiger seems far removed from portraying wild horses bearing savage frontiersmen, it might be noted that the west was the ground of U.S. colonialism and that western painting, where white men are returned to a threatening nature to overcome and conquer it, is Orientalist painting.17 The creation of a new race from contests with American nature is the theme, anyway, for Walcutt’s illustration of the Jardin des Plantes for a friend’s book about Paris (fig. 27). In his picture, the gate to the park has the enlarged heads of naturalists Georges Cuvier and the Comte de Buffon smiling atop a somewhat grim pile of bones and exotic animals (a lion, not a tiger), in a way that presents the imperial collection as strange, perhaps a realm for adventure, and not particularly scientific. Donn Piatt, a friend of Walcutt from

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Figure 27. William Walcutt, “Jardin des Plantes,” in Louise Piatt, Bell Smith Abroad (New York: J. C. Derby, 1854), 230. Public domain; image provided by Google and the University of Wisconsin.

Ohio and the American ambassador’s attaché in Paris, in his wife’s book interpreted the garden’s skeletal history of evolution in nationalist terms. If one compared the skulls of the Pilgrim fathers, calling them the heavy, strong, large-­lunged animal of England (comparable to the lion or the tiger, perhaps, in being capable of defeating equally savage enemies), he argued, to the present-­day weak and degenerate Yankee, nevertheless the heads of Webster, Clay, and Hawthorne (Piatt, like his friend Hawthorne, was an antislavery Democrat) would still show decided improvement.18 This was most likely meant as a humorous rebuke to Buffon’s famous theory that species de­ generated in the New World. To Piatt, the Anglo-­Saxon’s experience in the New World had led instead from Old World savagery in the forest to a more rational, if more commercial (thus Piatt’s play on “degenerate” Yankees) society. Unlike the clothed Wetsel with his strongly angled rifle accentuating his pinwheel motion versus the massive upright trees that frame him, Walcutt divides the later canvas on a diagonal, on one side framing Kenton’s heroic but passive nudity, white skin on a white horse, against very active riders and dogs and a loosely painted forest. On the opposite side, a group of spectators is packed into the corner, their lower position accelerating the rushing motion of Kenton’s horse and his outriders. The result is that Kenton, whose body is fully displayed—Walcutt emphasizes the shadow behind his raised

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head, so that it’s clear that despite his helplessness he is still thinking—is distinguished from the forest’s “savages.” Walcutt does draw parallels among the men. One mounted man in a loincloth, the one who is closest to Kenton’s nudity, parallels his position; he is active in driving the horses onward, while another, shoulder bared, reclines, with his cloaked body reversing Kenton’s pose. There is human, or natural, kinship among all the men, though the pair of dogs, in their coloration and poses, rhymes with the Indian men, not Kenton. But rather than a distant threat as they were in Bodmer, the Indians now closely frame the hero, mostly as spectators, witnesses rather than actors. Like Bodmer, Walcutt’s Indians have ornaments—blanket, feathers, buckskins, fringe, headbands, even a rifle, as well as a tomahawk—that suggest not animality but civilization. In a Sketch Club assignment, Walcutt contributed a similarly dressed Western hunter, in a fringed jacket.19 The multiplication of Indians (with their dogs, a mark of domesticity), watching, not just acting, emphasizes that they as a people—not just a pair of warriors, as in Millet, or as representatives of brute nature so to speak—are astonished by Kenton’s miraculous survival. Kenton’s survival of his martyrdom is a divine omen of the demise of his captors’ civilization, just as Tompkins Matteson, in the same Odd Fellows annual as “Joel Wetsel,” showed an Indian family as a microcosm of an entire society, doomed on the western edge of the continent (fig. 28).20 With details of their costume from moccasins to blankets once again carefully (if not accurately) reproduced, the mother and children in Matteson look east, toward the viewer, while the men, with only two arrows left, stare toward the Pacific. The implication is that they contemplate suicide and, perhaps, offer a warning to the civilization that will succeed them. The Odd Fellow who interpreted the illustration for the book’s readers saw its desolate Nature informing the “Redman”—a term that implies the whole race—about the genocidal new owners of their kingdom: “They, too, may one day fall” and “they, as few as us, shall sing / The dirge we sing to-­day.” The poet envisions the Paleface in their turn, though standing on Plymouth Rock rather than the coast of Alaska, still beholding an indifferent sea, while behind them, their former land is occupied by “a stranger race.” Most Odd Fellow illustrators preferred to picture American Indians in scenes like “The First Ship” spying on the arriving Pilgrims from Plymouth Rock, scenes intended to give the viewer who possesses a historical awareness the frisson of knowing their supposed fate. Nevertheless, the races are connected, even in their imagined doom. Men like Kenton, Wetzel, and Wetsel are true Americans because they prefer “contending with the savage denizens of the forest” to degenerate trade and commerce, and, in fighting Indians for the land, men

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Figure 28. Tompkins H. Matteson, “The Last of Their Race,” American Odd-Fellows’ Museum (New York: Edward Walker, 1856), between pages 364 and 365. Public domain; image provided by author.

like Wetzel and Kenton “laid the foundations of great States” through feats of personal bravery.21 In France, Walcutt learned and exploited a more flexible vocabulary for representing this national ancestry. In 1853, Walcutt sent home to New York his Turkey Shooting, a scene from James Fenimore Cooper’s 1823 novel, The Pioneers. It was a commission from Samuel P. Townsend that Walcutt likely received before he departed New York, but he may have continued to work on it even after he returned to New York, as one of the two existing versions of the painting is dated 1855 (fig. 29).22 Townsend had made a fortune in patent medicine sarsaparilla and in 1853 was building a brownstone mansion, with a picture gallery, on Fifth Avenue in the Murray Hill neighborhood not far from Samuel Burchard’s church. He may also have known Walcutt through his involvement with Sketch Club artists. Townsend had collaborated with John W. Orr on an 1849 panorama of the Hudson that included portions by Sketch Club member Joseph Kyle, and Townsend’s elaborate advertising circulars were engraved by William Dunnel, who had worked with Walcutt on a design for a Washington monument. Townsend’s manufacturing depot was next to the Sun office, where

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Figure 29. William Walcutt, Turkey Shooting, 1855, oil on canvas, 378 1/2 × 25 inches. Private collection. Public domain; image provided by Freeman’s Auction.

Walcutt had literary friends, and though Townsend advertised sarsaparilla everywhere, he got editorial endorsements from the Sun and the Odd Fellows’ Golden Rule. A deeply religious patriot, manufacturer, and banker (vice president of the Third Mechanics Building and Mutual Loan), Townsend wasn’t active politically, though he was vigorously antislavery and campaigned for the Republicans in 1860. But starting in 1862 he self-­published a series of pamphlets that indicate he was a Populist in embryo: he condemned the Republican Party’s commitment to a hard money policy as destructive to farmers and ordinary producers, benefitting only the Rothschilds and the slaveowners, and advocated for paper money instead. He also wanted state takeover of natural monopolies, including gas and railroads, for the benefit of the public. But he was in favor of a tariff, a traditionally Republican issue, because he feared that Americans would otherwise become slaves and serfs to European capitalists, with its artisans in competition with their pauperized labor. The result would be to turn Manhattan into the “seat of a new dynasty, that would receive its inspirations from the Holy City.” Writing under the name Patriot to warn about this threat from Europe and the Vatican, Townsend proposes (well after the demise of the American Party) creating a third party that will

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better protect the Christian nation, cut as it is from the Bible: its banner is to be “God, Liberty, Fraternity, Prosperity and Progress.” Under this motto, this third party will take the Kingdom (the U.S.) “under the whole Heavens and possess it for ever and ever.”23 Townsend, then, as an early manufacturer—a form of capitalism that in its early years maintained ties to artisan culture—seemed to share something of the working-­class and Protestant consciousness of Walcutt and his colleagues, including concern about immigrant labor and Romanism. Choosing Cooper as a literary source for a picture fit those concerns. Cooper was not only seen as a great American novelist, but as the inventor of the backwoodsman, the prototype for the Kentucky rifleman so admired by Walcutt, who battled both the English and the Indians. Walcutt’s notebooks have a long section of picture ideas based on “stories of the far west” that include the Joel Wetsel pictures, but also family stories about Indians, hunters, cordoroy pantaloons, and many, many titles that suggest humorous frontier moments: “The Kentuckian and the Bed Bugs,” “The Menagerie in Illinois,” “Jones’ First Statue” (possibly his friend, T. D. Jones), “The Breakfast of Wild Turkey, or Western Hospitality,” “The Shooting Match and Barrel of Beer.”24 Painting Cooper’s scene of the “Turkey Shoot,” from his much reprinted novel The Pioneers, gave a prestigious literary genealogy to Walcutt’s own pictures of frontier life, which, albeit with humor (as appropriate for the “folk”), heroized the independence, resourcefulness, and natural morality of Americans. After the Civil War, “turkey shoots” as a subject became more generic American “folk” life, detached from Cooper’s text, and mostly illustrations rather than paintings.25 Cooper’s novel is set in a frontier community in upstate New York in the late eighteenth century, where a diverse array of former Quakers, Vermont woodchoppers, New England Presbyterians, Irish dragoons, British sailors, French storekeepers, and so on, encounter each others’ customs at the tavern, or in the makeshift church/school, or while shooting pigeons. Cooper sets up the turkey shoot as most emblematic of this frontier life because it is a contest of expert marksmanship, restricted to men (eyebrows are raised when his heroine participates, even indirectly), in which natural excellence rather than education, or money, or the law determines the victor. Its ­egalitarian character is underscored by it being hosted by Abraham Freeborn, an entrepreneur who runs the contest to see who can kill the native bird, and the only free African American in the book.26 Artists who portrayed Cooper’s scene, which involves most of the cast of characters in the novel, could choose which element of typical (or mythic) American life to foreground.

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When Charles Deas, who became a specialist in western pictures, painted the turkey shoot in 1838, he made Freeborn the central character, choosing to portray the moment when he repeatedly pleads with the white contestants to give a Black man “fair play” (fig. 30). In Deas’s painting, Freeborn is contrasted with the white men around him—one literally holding him back—who are subjects of mockery, too: winking, gambling, stomping on a hat, and aligned with the tavern (and dead tree) on the hill behind them.27 In perhaps a further indication of his sympathies, Deas includes two turkeys: a dead one, its feathers visible, on a sled in the foreground, next to a somewhat caricatured African American boy, and another bird tied in the distance. This version of the ritual of shooting the turkey, the public witnessing of the death of a scapegoat on a Christian holiday, emphasizes the economic and civil restraints white Americans imposed on Black people. Freeborn is as bound as his turkey is to the stake. But the repetition of the bird, alive and dead, might also imply the sacrifice, in the body of the turkey itself, of American Indians and a wilder America.28

Figure 30. Charles Deas, Turkey Shooting, by 1838. Oil on canvas, 24 1/4 × 29 1/2 inches. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, the Paul Mellon Collection. Public domain; image provided by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

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Walcutt, as was his habit, painted two versions of his painting, perhaps to send one to his brother’s museum in Columbus (see figs. 29, 31).29 One of them, presumably not Townsend’s, with the title Deerslayer at the Shooting Match, was exhibited as for sale at the Derby Gallery in New York in 1863. Both versions diverge sharply from the one by Deas. They instead structure the contest and the community around a comparison of Natty Bumppo, the old frontiersman nicknamed Leatherstocking, who despises the townfolk’s “wasty ways,” their pointless (commercially dictated) destruction of trees and animals, and Billy Kirby, who is equally adept at surviving in the wilderness, but who is the archetype of the pioneer—if he sees a tree, he chops it down. Kirby in the novel briefly becomes Leatherstocking’s ally against the town’s imposition of law and order, but in this scene, as in the story of Joel Wetsel, Walcutt and Cooper compare the two types of woodsmen, independent and market-­oriented.30 In both of Walcutt’s paintings, Billy Kirby is supported by the tools and harbingers of civilization: his axe, several raw tree stumps and felled logs that provide seating, the wooden fence, and the whole town spread below him. By contrast, Leatherstocking’s long legs and elongated body display his mix of American Indian and Anglo-­American dress, evoking Walcutt’s description in the Republic of the deadly accurate Kentucky rifleman, whose tall figure “seemed to grow, phantom-­like, higher and higher” as he shot.31 Walcutt groups around him the characters who are similarly identified with the wilderness and the natural law of the hunter (versus the law of the market). In Townsend’s version of the painting, Walcutt even adds Bumppo’s dogs, Hector and the Slut, who like the man himself express an idea of a natural right (to hunt) that supersedes the law or sportsmen’s rules (see fig. 29). Seated next to Leatherstocking is a “red” man of the forest who shares this view of a natural order, John Mohegan, a great Mohican warrior who has been Christianized (until the novel’s end, when he returns to his true identity as a noble pagan). He faces the viewer in the posture of a melancholy thinker, his stoicism evident, but also his impoverishment, in his plain brown clothes— though in the earlier version Walcutt adds two feathers to his hair. No turkey is visible in either of Walcutt’s scenes; it’s not necessary, since the real sacrifice, the Mohicans and the wilderness, are in the foreground. Natty Bumppo wins the shoot, as his active pose suggests. His skinny upright form, like his long gun, ends in a hat with a tuft that echoes the four chimneys behind him, indicating his alliance with Judge Temple, the town’s wealthy founder. In Townsend’s version of the picture, not just the chimneys but the whole roof of a mansion is visible behind the trees. The house is a symbol of Temple, who is a type of frontier masculinity in his role as adjudicator of human law. But the house is deliberately—by Walcutt in Townsend’s

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Figure 31. William Walcutt, Scenes from the Pioneers: Deerslayer at the Shooting Match, circa 1850, oil on canvas, 12 3/4 × 18 1/4 inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. George B. Tatum. Public domain; image provided by the Smithsonian.

painting, and by Cooper—overdone, too grand and elaborate, a miscellany, perhaps a little like Leatherstocking’s composite dress. Deas placed the common man’s tavern and its alcohol behind the shooting match, but in Walcutt, the landowner’s castle is “behind” the contest. The discordant mansion is a sign that the land’s current owner is as misbegotten as his house: Judge Temple is an unlearned magistrate, a Quaker who owns slaves, an unprincipled supporter of the Revolution who bought forfeited Loyalist land cheap from a former partner. The origins of the architectural design? Also questionable, in Cooper’s terms. It was built for Temple by an unscrupulous Yankee in what the architect called the most practical and adaptable style, the composite order, as it was composed of bits and pieces from different pattern books.32 In Cooper’s story, the roof, unintentionally, becomes the most conspicuous element. Golden, shingled, with an elevated platform, gaudily painted railings, urns, and moldings on its four sides, and the tall chimneys rising above it—the resulting castle’s inartistic pile-­up of the signs of wealth and status immediately caused three families in town to imitate it. Though Walcutt, in Paris, may not have realized it, the eclectic style that Cooper saw as typical of American parvenus might for some have evoked

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Townsend’s new house on Fifth Avenue, which had a scalloped, hexagonal belvedere on the roof as well as a mixed classical, Gothic, and Italianate exterior, including bay windows and balconies. It even, like Judge Temple’s home, had a massive entrance hall that rose four stories (and a Pompeii fresco room, and one with stained glass). Cooper is satirical about such “Yankee” architecture because of its false pragmatism—the porch dangles from Temple’s roof rather than supporting it—which belies its real aim of showiness. Walcutt in the earlier version of Turkey Shooting shrinks the mansion so that just three of its four chimneys are visible, softening the satire. Their upright character in both nevertheless reinforces both Leatherstocking’s stance and the shared conservationism between the elite landowner who hunts for sport and the natural hunter of the forest. For some nineteenth-­century readers the composite character of Temple’s mansion, with its mix of styles, rather than suggesting an incoherent attempt to copy European architecture that betrayed a false class position, might convey the idea of an American style as forged by the frontier, as a mix of cultures. Cooper’s town had that mix: free and enslaved persons, one Native American (who lived on the outskirts), Yankees, and new immigrants, including an English sailor, a refugee French grocer, a Protestant Irish couple who ran the tavern, a Dutch lawyer, and a Palatine German visitor—all of whom speak with comic accents. None of the immigrants (nor hybrids like Leatherstocking) seem to have children, something that would suggest their future stake in the society; only the Episcopalian minister and the town’s owner have daughters. Nevertheless, Cooper’s frontier, at least as written in 1823, is a place of diversity and a force for assimilation into Anglo-­American culture. By the end of the novel, “mixed” characters like Natty Bumppo and John Mohegan are gone or dead, Yankee corporate and commercial culture seems destined to take over the town’s businesses, and it is discovered that the true “heir” to the land and husband to the white daughters is an aristocratic, Episcopalian Englishman, who is also a backwoodsman. By the time Walcutt decided to frame the turkey shoot as a contest between two types of frontier Americans, however, Cooper’s place as delineator of uniquely republican, ethnically diverse American character had changed. In the thirty years since the Pioneers first appeared, Cooper’s novels were increasingly associated with the belief that the influx of non-­Protestant foreigners was incompatible with his vision of the emergence of a natural American democracy. Cooper’s close friend Samuel Morse had been active in the nativist movement as early as the 1830s, and by the 1840s, Cooper too longs for the old New York, “the true, native portion of the population, and not the throng from Ireland and Germany, who now crowd the streets.” Cooper warns

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in print of the “advent of a new race” of Americans “who will neither understand nor appreciate colonial society and its construction.”33 Like Thomas Whitney in the Republic, or Walcutt with his publication of his grandfather’s recollections of the revolution, or the flood of pictures of Washington and colonial times by artists like Tompkins Matteson, Junius Brutus Stearns, Thomas Rossiter, and Benson Lossing, Cooper’s recreation of the eighteenth century was designed (or could easily be understood as designed) to instruct readers and viewers on who the real Americans were.34 As a “western” writer, Cooper’s sympathy with actual American Indians, akin to the prominence of the cast-­down John Mohegan in Walcutt’s painting, also fit the nativist view of the country. American Indians had long figured as a useful symbol for cultural nationalists, and Whitney’s Republic paired a Continental soldier with an Indian brave on its frontispiece, just as the Know-­ Nothings elected chiefs and sachems as officers (see fig. 10.). Nativists, because of their emphasis on men and women who were born on American soil as the only true citizens, deliberately aligned themselves with both the red and white men of the forest. One of the messages of the nativists was that it would be better for “the aborigines of our native forests, and the slaves of our southern plantations” to be admitted to citizenship than foreigners.35 Editor, Ojibwe, and Protestant missionary George Copway (Kah-­ge-­ga-­gah-­bowh) tried to make this position more than rhetoric; he enlisted the American Party in his battle to give American Indians a sovereign territory and citizenship and found a friend in that party’s presidential candidate, Millard Fillmore. Copway argued that as full self-­governing citizens, American Indians would acculturate—just as had, in the reverse direction, Anglo frontiersmen like Natty Bumppo. Among the contributors to his American Indian newspaper, he listed Cooper as well as nativist poet George P. Morris. Cooper’s (and Walcutt’s) Mohican, doomed to destruction in the frontier of cleared forests and Yankee commerce that they envisioned, stood as an example of what Copway’s legislative program aimed to avoid. John Mohegan’s character in this sense supported Copway’s design to preserve American Indians from white perfidy. Thomas Whitney agreed; in one of his relatively rare speeches as a Know-­ Nothing congressman, he argued against reparations to white settlers who instigated conflicts with tribes; the native-­born had equal rights. Walcutt illustrated a western novel, Jason Rockwood Orton’s Campfires of the Red Men, that followed a similar line of thought. Orton’s novel had the admirable aim of demonstrating that “noble hearts / beat in bronze breasts as freely as in pearl,” and that “we are all brothers.”36 Despite Orton’s (like Cooper’s and Walcutt’s) stereotyping, with animadversions throughout on how Indians live for revenge and exterminate all their foes, as they know no mercy,

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the plot at least theoretically illustrates Orton’s belief that U.S. policy should be to assimilate American Indians rather than kill them, as these native-­born men are perfectly capable of becoming citizens. His novel is set in the eighteenth century, before the Revolution, in a frontier world where such mingling of white and red in the forests (not the town), still seemed plausible. Orton’s hero, stolen by Indians as a baby, is reunited by the end with his white family. The hero and his father then “adopt” one of the adult (though they call him “boy”) Iroquois of his former tribe. Though force isn’t used in this later case, the novel’s message is that it is better to force Indians to adopt modes of civilized life than to forcibly remove them from the soil. It better befits a Christian nation to extend these natural brethren citizenship. Yet Orton makes his pitch for better treatment of American Indians in the context of a certain disapproval of nineteenth-­century immigration: “We throw our doors wide open to the world, even the Hindoo and Chinaman,” yet we exclude the Indian, who (while equally pagan) is greatly their superior, as he is also the superior of “those from the different states of Europe who avail themselves of our liberality.”37 If Orton, then, like the Know-­Nothings, framed support for American Indians in the context of a brotherhood of the native-­born, Walcutt’s two illustrations for the 1855 novel, surprisingly, show just the opposite of a fraternal bond (fig. 32). Walcutt may have known lyricist Orton through his wife’s interests in music—Orton was a songwriter who published regularly in the same musical journal as George Morris, A. J. H. Duganne, Alice Cary (the last two being Sketch Club participants), and William J. Wetmore, whose music Walcutt would illustrate.38 Or it may have been a decision on the part of the publisher, J. C. Derby, who had hired Walcutt for another book just the year before. In any case, Walcutt’s designs for Orton resemble Matteson’s melodramatic pictures for the Odd Fellows’s newspapers. In one, an Iroquois on a cliff threatens to dash a baby’s brains out, while the helpless white father watches. In the other, the hero embraces an unhappy (and quite tightly and aristocratically corseted) young woman tenderly on his breast, in a garden. The stances of the two young men are nearly identical, despite their diametrically opposed characters, and the novel’s (white) hero actually appears in both: he is the endangered baby as well as the adult who has learned the chivalrous arts of European civilization. The hero leaves his beloved—it is the departure scene that Walcutt illustrates in their embrace—for fear he endangers her. While he is in exile in the wilderness, he recognizes that God is active providentially, and evoking the popular series of paintings and prints by Thomas Cole, the Voyage of Life (1842), is the unseen pilot on the river of life.39 His conversion experience opens him to fraternal feelings toward the

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Figure 32. William Walcutt, frontispiece illustrations engraved by John W. Orr, for Jason ­Rockwood Orton, Campfires of the Red Men (New York: J. C. Derby, 1855). Public domain; image provided by author.

Iroquois, and the broader implication may be that Christianized Indians like Copway (but not the pagan villain of Orton’s book and Walcutt’s illustration) are brothers. Perhaps the parallelism in Walcutt’s illustrations of the two men similarly refers to a cycle of destined and providential separations (son from father, man from wife, even white man from red), but they don’t in and of themselves underscore the idea of American Indians as fellow citizens. Perhaps further evidence that Walcutt’s views were closer to Democratic westerners than to eastern views like Whitney’s lies in Walcutt’s pictures of revolutionary Americans seeking liberty in 1776. In these prototypes of the nation’s future citizenry, he did not include American Indians. Tompkins Matteson, whose Last of Their Race painting and engraving were set in the present rather than the more utopian colonial frontier and were void of any ideas about assimilation, also painted Cooper’s Turkey Shoot (fig. 33). His design of 1857 differs from those of both Deas and Walcutt. He exiles the frontiersmen and Indians to mere framing devices and Freeborn to a contented sacrifice next to the dead turkey. Natty Bumppo, watching the action

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Figure 33. Tompkins H. Matteson, The Turkey Shoot, 1857, oil on canvas, 36 1/8 × 48 inches. Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York. Public domain; image provided by The Image of the Black in Western Art Project and Photo Archive, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University.

warily, stands apart from the forces of civilization (the sheriff, as a representative of the law, is allied with Judge Temple). John Mohegan, hunched and face invisible, is on the opposite side of the group from Leatherstocking, so far on the edge that his body is cropped. Front and center instead is a scene of domestic union. The lovely Betsy Temple, daughter of the owner of the town, brings her aristocratic suitor to his knees, heralding their coming marriage and the joining of the formerly hostile Loyalist and Rebel families, which will secure the inheritance of the land. Walcutt put the elegantly dressed Betsy on Bumppo’s side, though she is being held back from helping him by the sheriff. Cooper’s sheriff is no aristocrat, but a symbol of the law, someone who owns farm-­raised, not wild, turkeys, and is deeply hostile to Leatherstocking. But Betsy is an aristocrat and recognizes Bumppo’s ethic as valiant and noble, and in Walcutt, she visually backs him up. In Matteson, the sheriff separates her position from Leatherstocking, and instead, she and her English lover bond over the body of the wild turkey, its feathers and beak

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prominently silhouetted against the snow, a symbol of the conquered wilderness, and over the living body of its former owner, Abraham Freeborn. Freeborn smiles benevolently, wedged between the couple. No longer pleading for a fair chance, this is a man—though there are touches of the minstrel’s comic mask—contented with the prospective Union that will reinforce the existing one. Matteson remained a Constitutional Unionist rather than joining the Republicans, at least until the war started, indicating he was not as engaged with antislavery sentiments as Walcutt. Though both illustrators frequently pictured beautiful, idealized young women, in various centuries and situations, their bodies oriented toward the viewer, Matteson more explicitly makes women and a natural (because sexual) union the prize for brave young white men who turn away from the wilderness. In Matteson’s construction of the origins of American society it is no accident that the working-­class Billy Kirby is aligned with Betsy Temple’s future husband; they will both gain from the new Union, since it is one that legitimizes the existing order. But on Walcutt’s imagined frontier, with the legislative Compromise of 1850 between North and South newly in place, or in 1855 at the height of Know-­Nothing fervor, it was not the African American but the “Native American,” whether Leatherstocking, Kenton, Orton’s hero, or Wetsel, who was the threatened hero.

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On his return from France, Walcutt married. His bride’s stepfather, the Reverend Burchard, officiated, and the antislavery and anti-­abolitionist New York Evangelist, which one weekly called a nativist paper, published an announcement.1 Walcutt largely gave up writing poetry and stories for the newspapers after this, but his sketchbooks and his wife’s memory album provide a glimpse into the network of Protestant social reformers that surrounded them. This group of humanitarian idealists, who wanted allegorical and spiritual art—a genre in which highly paid artists like Daniel Huntington and Thomas Rossiter specialized—would also support illustrators like Walcutt and his friends in the New York Sketch Club. In common with the Sketch Club members, most were not politically active in nativist parties, but their very dedication to reform carried them into similar rhetorical and social positions. The nativist cause, the goal of the Order of United Americans and the Know-­Nothings, to limit the suffrage of immigrants to weaken the supposed influence of the Catholic Church and increase their own political power, was, in a sense, a Protestant reform, just as much as were the temperance, Sabbatarian, and antislavery movements. Walcutt’s milieu included members of all those groups. It’s possible to know this because he kept a record of some of the visitors to his household in a sketchbook as well as a list of his pictures, which included portraits that he painted, as well as travel sketchbooks with similar notations. His wife, Agnes, a skilled musician (he designed a music cabinet for her), also kept a book with inscriptions from friends and visitors. Among the poets, musicians, actors, painters, ministers, doctors, architects, lawyers, manufacturers (not just S. P. Townsend, but Silas Herring, the maker of fireproof “Salamander” safes), and hoteliers that they recorded, the majority 77

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had a connection to Protestant evangelical reform. Among them: missionary Arthur T. Pierson, a member of Burchard’s Thirteenth Street Church; the Reverend Joseph Ransom, Anglican missionary; author and naturalist Charles Webber, who wrote about Sam the Know-­Nothing; poet Jonathan M. Knowlton, a regular contributor to Whitney’s Republic; Jesse Talbot, a kindly landscape painter and agent for the American Tract Society (and a contributor to Odd Fellow papers); D. W. C. Clark of the American Baptist Mission Society; and Dexter A. Hawkins, author of a book on the destiny of the Anglo-­Saxon race, to name a few.2 Poets included not just C. D. Stuart, but Caleb Lyon, who wrote poems for the New York Herald about Anglo-­Saxons going to fight Mexico for God and Washington, and whose poetry accompanied Young America and Odd Fellow author C. E. Lester’s profiles of American artists. Lyon was elected to Congress as an independent in 1853 with the help of the religious and temperance movements in his district and the approval of nativist papers like America’s Own.3 Perhaps inevitably, given this context of Protestant advocacy, Walcutt illustrated one of the many editions of Proverbial Philosophy, the bestselling poetry book by the anti-­Catholic English writer Martin Tupper. The engraver was William Dunnel, who worked for the Sunday Dispatch; the publisher, Baker and Scribner, put out Sunday Dispatch editor Charles Burkhardt’s book of fairy tales, discussed later, as well as popular books on Washington by nativist minister J. T. Headley, and Lester’s books. The Christian Advocate called Walcutt’s frontispiece for Tupper a gem (fig. 34).4 In a scene that somewhat recalls Poussin’s classicizing Et in Arcadia Ego, a muse seems to guide an elderly man’s hand to recognition of the writing on a wall that could also be a tombstone, while a child and a young man stand in for the other Ages of Man. That idea of progress toward death, guided by faith, reflects Tupper’s own somewhat conservative approach to the spirit of the age. Tupper could advocate for overthrowing tyrants and for free knowledge, as long as religion (as per his philosophy) was there to wall out the false and the bad. The young woman in Walcutt’s illustration thus directs the reader to the wall of religious consolation; flowers of reason and youth may cling to it, but it is timeless and enduring, like the stone. Tupper’s biographer calls his hugely popular book a new Pilgrim’s Progress, with the reader progressing not through a landscape as in Bunyan’s famous Protestant fable, but through a modern world of machines. For the fanatical Tupper, a friend of telegraph inventor Samuel Morse, British and American industrial and social progress meant Catholicism, which belonged to an older order, could be dispensed with. In free verse, he urged what seem like universal sentiments: “Giant aggregate of Nations, / Glorious Whole of glorious Parts, / Unto endless generations / Live United, hand and hearts!”5 This

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Figure 34. William N. Dunnel after William Walcutt, frontispiece, M ­ artin F. Tupper, ­P roverbial ­Philosophy (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1849). Public domain; image provided by author.

fraternal rhetoric of unity made him exceedingly popular, but it especially attracted admirers from the cultural nationalist and nativist set, including other authors Walcutt would illustrate, like Cornelius Mathews and Charles Burkhardt. Burkhardt in his review of Tupper praised Walcutt’s classic taste

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and fertile fancy as making his narratives, including his illustration for Proverbial Philosophy, very effective. C. E. Lester, who authored Anglo-­Saxon– themed and true American screeds for Whitney’s Republic and the Odd Fellows, was a Tupper fan, as was Millard Fillmore. Fillmore understood Tupper’s philosophy of the glorious whole as supporting Compromise on the Union, despite the latter’s antislavery credentials, and he invited Tupper to dine at the White House, where Fillmore accepted one of Tupper’s medals of King Alfred as proof of the two nations’ Anglo-­Saxon brotherhood. The rhetoric of such an alliance advancing civilization around the world itself reinforced the idea of the unanimity of the American Union.6 But Walcutt’s circle also included reformers who belonged to the more radical economic and spiritual borders of reform. Horace Greeley is an example: a printer (and so an artisan), a Protestant Whig who believed in spiritualism (communication with the spirits of the dead), the prohibition of alcohol and slavery, and Fourierism, a proto-­socialist communal living movement that also appealed to the workingmen’s editors of America’s Own. Walcutt only had a tangential relationship with Greeley—his records indicate he planned to write a story about “Horace Greeley and the Oranges,” and Greeley’s Tribune liked a Walcutt design for a George Washington monument in New York—but the popularity of Greeley’s nearly socialist Tribune is an example of the pervasiveness among reformers of what might now seem to have been fringe ideas.7 While Walcutt’s records included portraits and visits from Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian ministers, he also befriended and sketched spiritualists who were only loosely linked to established religion: Mary Gove, the feminist and radical, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, son of a Presbyterian minister and bohemian advocate of hashish, C. Chauncey Burr, a Universalist antislavery minister, and advocate of Mesmerism, and the Reverend Thomas Lake Harris, an investigator of spiritualism and an Odd Fellow. One might think that ministers like Burchard (and his family) would be quite critical of spiritualism, but the distinction between the views of the more mainstream churches and the liberal Universalist churches that often hosted spiritualists were not always sharply drawn, and they formed alliances on issues like slavery and temperance. The Reverend E. H. Chapin, who replaced Harris as minister of New York’s fourth Universalist society, presided over a Universalist church on Broadway that had rooms for art exhibitions and for Walcutt’s atelier. Chapin’s Boston Symbol, the voice of Northern antislavery among the Odd Fellows, in 1845 had contributions from workingmen’s rights authors who also appeared in papers like America’s Own that supported Burchard, too.8

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George Walcutt, William’s brother, was a medium to the spirits, and perhaps he provided some connections to this group. Walcutt’s wife, Agnes, and her friendships with fellow musicians in New York, may have been another bridge. Agnes Walcutt attracted musicians into their orbit, some of whom had spiritualist interests. Of these, novelist Jason Rockwood Orton was the most active spiritualist, as well as a medical doctor, songwriter, and journalist; songwriter and doctor William J. Wetmore wrote for the same publications.9 Wetmore dedicated the music for I May Not Meet Thee (an ideal topic for a spiritualist) to his friend J. R. Orton, and Walcutt illustrated not only Orton’s novel about the colonial west, but a Wetmore song of 1857, The Lilac at the Door (fig. 35).10

Figure 35. William Walcutt, cover illustration, William Wetmore, The Lilac at the Door (New York: William Hall & Son, 1857). Public domain; image provided by the Library of Congress.

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Wetmore’s music, like the writings of Orton, Harris, and the spiritualists generally, was free from virulent nativism. His lyrics play more on Young America’s idea of an expanded nation (expansive physically and in the rights accorded to working-­class men) that would permit homesteading of public lands. Though he wrote music with George P. Morris, Wetmore’s 1852 Uncle Sam’s Invitation to the World explicitly invited the toiling millions and starving men abroad to come live under the tree of liberty, where “Uncle Sam has land enough to give us all a Farm.”11 In illustrating Wetmore’s The Lilac at the Door, Walcutt provides what Walt Whitman, in his own poem about lilacs in the dooryard, would call “an old farm-­house near the white-­wash’d palings.”12 Walcutt frames the house with a boy and girl whose youthfulness reinforces the (adult) singer’s distance from the scene. For the singer, the friends are gone, the robin is flown, and the lilac is withered; one can’t go home again. But above the children, two winged female fairies (and one slightly animalistic one) as well as two butterflies disport themselves. Their presence, with the ephemerality and transformations that butterflies denote, marks the “sweet song of youth” as an allegory of death and loss, but they are also a sign of spiritualist influence on Walcutt. Fairies were a way of imagining American nature as infused with spiritual—divine and Protestant—meaning. Most of the spiritualist friends and patrons of Walcutt were part of a group around publisher and editor Samuel B. Brittan that lobbied for working-­class rights. Spiritualists in Brittan’s orbit with Walcutt connections included his sitter Burr (editor of the pro-­Compromise National Democrat), Isaac Pray, a playwright who promoted one of Walcutt’s actor sitters (and an editor at the pro-­Compromise New York Herald), and Justus W. Redfield, a publisher who would employ Walcutt and who did printing for the Odd Fellows.13 More significantly, Walcutt’s friend Carlos D. Stuart, with Brittan, Walcutt’s sitter the Reverend T. L. Harris (pastor of a church that Greeley and Whitman attended), and Fanny Green (who wrote for the Odd Fellows journals), edited the American People’s Journal. The American People’s Journal accordingly featured advocates of workers and land reform and considered the spirit of the age republican and millennialist. As Stuart wrote in the paper, “In America, we are all kings, and to the new breathing millions, even the air yields—our feet are iron and our hands are steel. Free, rational thought will make the Despots of Europe tremble.”14 Stuart’s vision of the inevitable progress of democratic revolution is coded; for most readers, those despots who tried to control thought included the pope. The monthly planned to feature Walcutt’s rather sweet portrait of Stuart as part of a profile of the Universalist preacher (fig. 36).15

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Figure 36. William N. Dunnel after William Walcutt, Portrait of Carlos D. Stuart, 1849, ­engraving. Collection of David Walcutt. Walcutt also painted Stuart’s wife-to-be, Catherine Chichester Oakely. Public domain; image provided by author.

The “iron man” that Stuart describes, the worker produced by industrialization, was a staple of another Sketch Club visitor’s rhetoric, too. A. J. H. Duganne, an Odd Fellow, wrote for most of the penny papers, possibly even with Stuart on the New York Daily News, as his ardor for liberty, labor, and native American principles was widely shared among these editors. Duganne began tilting toward nativism in the 1840s, with secret societies of the native-­ born defending against immigrant organizations in his 1845 novel Knights of the Seal. By 1855 he was elected to the state legislature as a Know-­Nothing. But he shared with the more liberal American People’s Journal a rhetoric about the working man as a class capable of standing up to industry as well as to tyrants.16 The Iron Man, the name of Duganne’s short-­lived weekly newspaper, was mocked as a patchwork knight in an issue of T. W. Strong’s comic Yankee Notions, which employed artists in Walcutt’s Sketch Club. But another cartoon in the same issue makes the figure’s role plain: iron was a much more militant image of the working class than the standard Whig newsboy, with his harmless childish cockiness about being a “Native

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Figure 37. “The first appearance (and probably the last) of Duganne’s “Iron Man” (left) and “Here’s more of them Furreners, Bill!” (right), Yankee Notions 1 (February 1852): 56 and 42. Public domain; images provided by Google and the University of Minnesota.

American” (fig. 37). Strong may have actually been sympathetic to Duganne’s advocacy, as suggested by his illustrating one of Duganne’s pro-­Fillmore poems in Burkhardt’s Sunday Dispatch a few years later. The editors of the spiritualist American People’s Journal also praised Strong, who contributed to them, as well—in their case an illustration of a liberty pole and cap towering over a fallen crown and sword. They also admired the genius of Whig medalist C. C. Wright, who collaborated with Walcutt on the Henry Clay medal taken over by the Know-Nothings.17 Stuart had a hand in multiple papers. While assisting Brittan, he was also regularly contributing to Burr’s Nineteenth Century—a journal that sought to advance the Brotherhood of Man through a literature of the workshop rather than the parlor—and the New-­Yorker. The Sun carried his poetic invective against tyranny (he was chief editor there from 1843 to 1853 and won a $50 prize from the paper for a poem on labor in 1855), as did the Evening Mirror (he became an associate editor there in 1855 but had been contributing since 1849). His writing about the progressive spirit of the age and the power of workers to shed their chains had the same passionate character as the Order of United Americans’ patriotic dedication to true “American” liberty. The cover of the American People’s Journal had at its center the soaring American

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eagle, with flag and arrows, just like the logos of the Odd Fellows and the United Americans. Stuart had credentials in all those camps. In addition to writing for the Odd Fellows’ annuals and Whitney’s Republic (he traced his ancestry to Bunker Hill soldiers), Stuart owned a bust of Know-­Nothing presidential candidate George Law, carved by his friend and dinner companion T. D. Jones, another copy of which fellow poet and Sketch Club member William Fosdick presented to the nativist club supporting Law’s candidacy.18 That choice of Law, who made his fortune in steamships, marks a certain progressivism typical of the spiritualist camp; the New York Herald supported the antislavery industrialist Law, too, in preference to Millard Fillmore, the old-­fogy, silver-­gray Whig. For the artists, poets, ministers, and reformers around Walcutt, nature’s truth and moral virtue or divine revelation were the same. Stuart in 1849 wrote in Agnes Leeds’s album, “The pure is ever beautiful / But most in heart of youth, / Where love is linked to gladness, / And virtue’s linked to truth.” Peter B. Wight, an architect and American advocate of the Pre-­Raphaelites, a movement that ardently sought truth in nature, was also a frequent contributor to the album (Walcutt painted his parents, and his father, lawyer Amherst Wight, may have been an Odd Fellow, as he contributed poems to the Golden Rule). When one of Walcutt’s friends gave his future wife a drawing book, he chose one by John Ruskin, the leading pre-­Raphaelite spokesman who insisted on faithful copying of nature (as taught at the Working Men’s College in London) to understand divine law.19 This tendency toward a certain idealization of nature—necessary for purity and beauty to equal truth— perhaps explains why Walcutt was still beardless when he had his photograph taken in the 1860s (fig. 38). A beard on an artist signaled his interest in nature, and especially “in allowing Nature to have her own way, which is always the best way.” Walcutt illustrated this, albeit negatively, in a funny commentary, “The Artists and the Smallpox,” for the Republic, suggesting that smallpox only afflicted artists (nature had its way with them) who had full beards.20 All the artists recovered, he added. For hirsute landscape painters like Asher Durand or Walcutt’s spiritualist friend Stuart, nature, health, and beauty were kindred concepts, but for someone like Walcutt, who retained closer ties to traditional organized church worship, belief in directed nature, signaled by the shaven chin, was still important. The photographer for Walcutt’s portrait, Augustus Morand, intersected with Walcutt’s interests in religion, music, and art. Before Morand moved to Brooklyn, where Walcutt sat for the photograph, Morand had contributed daguerreotype portraits for engravings in Holden’s Dollar Magazine, where the editors had praised Walcutt. Morand also edited New York’s Musical

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Figure 38. Augustus Morand, William Walcutt, sculptor, c. 1860–68, card. Collection of David Walcutt. Public domain; image provided by author.

World, a journal that merged for a few years with the Musical Times, which was edited by another Walcutt collaborator. Most music weeklies, including these, covered art, literature, and poetry and had extensive coverage of church and choral music. And in 1851, when Morand was still on Chatham Street in Manhattan, Walcutt was writing for The Daguerreian Journal, where Nathaniel Orr was an engraver and Morand an advertiser. Photographers, caught between the world of mechanics and the fine arts, supported artists’ efforts to found cooperative institutions like Walcutt’s. Perhaps musicians did, too. Composer, son of a clergyman, and German immigrant Herrman Saroni, one of the Walcutts’ visitors, received patents for steam generators, wrote stories about painters, edited a music journal, and founded a symphony orchestra in Georgia, which might itself be considered a form of associationism.21 The same readiness to idealize as Walcutt’s and Morand’s portraits evince is evident elsewhere in the reform-­minded American People’s Journal. While it did not include the long poems written in trances by spiritualists like the Reverend Harris, it did include Harris’s treatises on the Ideal: the present age may be materialist, but ideas marshal armies.22 The magazine’s poetry

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similarly aimed for a moralized material world. John C. Hagen, a member of Walcutt’s American Artists Association, officer of the Sketch Club, and Odd Fellow, contributed many such poems not only to American People’s Journal, but to Odd Fellow annuals, the Christian Inquirer, and the Crayon, an art journal with a pre-­Raphaelite editor. His paintings could be interpreted along these lines as well. For example, writing in the American People’s Journal, Fanny Green describes a Hagen Snow Scene in terms of its ability to convey naturalistically the character of the atmosphere, its whirling flakes, and dreamy, shadowy softness (cf. fig. 39). She contrasts a lone pine with a snug cottage, nature’s difficulties and burdens with human perseverance and memories of home. Or, as Hagen put it, “From travel when returning still / The first that seems to welcome me, / High tow’ring over wood and hill, / Is that old wither’d, leafless tree.”23 Like Thomas Cole, an honorary member of the New York Sketch Club to whom Hagen wrote a tribute, the natural landscape summons the voice of humanity, which is to say, moral and religious meaning. Green, more stirringly but in a similar fashion, interpreted Sketch Club member Charles Blauvelt’s First Snow-­Storm, a genre scene of urban urchins having a snowball fight: “This sharp north wind will stir the blood. . . . The Present is yours.”24 Her rousing message about the north’s manly blood was addressed to the Young, those who are leading democratic revolutions, in one of the Odd Fellows’ annual gift books.

Figure 39. John Cole Hagen, Snow Scene (Labor’s End), 1847, oil on canvas, 25 × 30 inches. Private collection, image provided by James D. Julia, Fairfield, Maine.

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Hagen’s poems were collected into a volume entitled Foot-­Prints of Truth; Or, Voice of Humanity, illustrated by his friends Walcutt, F. A. Chapman, and Christopher P. Cranch, whose brother, John, was a Sketch Club member.25 C. P. Cranch, another poet-­painter, was part of transcendentalist and Associationist circles in New York, along with artists like T. P. Rossiter and Thomas Hicks and editors like Greeley at the Whig Tribune and Parke Godwin at the Democratic Evening Post. While not conventionally religious, these New Englanders and New Yorkers were ardent supporters of democracy and antislavery movements; in Ohio, one might add to these circles Donn Piatt, an Ohio journalist and friend of Cranch and Walcutt (and later Rossiter), who met Godwin when he traveled to New York, and who will appear in Chapter 5’s discussion of the influence of foreign liberation movements on cultural nationalists.26 Cranch and Godwin had joined Walcutt and other Sketch Club members (including Stuart) in welcoming revolutionary Louis Kossuth to New York, and these transcendentalists sympathized with the working-­class fight against capital and industry. Both Godwin and Greeley, another Kossuth admirer, were involved with founding proto-­communes; Piatt, like Duganne, advocated for laborers in strong terms: “It is only when the brawny hands of labor are on the neck of capital that concession is granted. Violence is progress.”27 But the transcendentalists, perhaps because of German idealism’s insistence on the existence of ideas beyond (transcending) the material, as per Thomas Lake Harris’s belief in the power of the Ideal to mold the Actual, were also associated with spiritualism and humanitarian reform. The title for Hagen’s book also suggests that ideas leave traces (footprints) in the real world that are visible to sensitive interpreters—perhaps especially to artists. Hagen’s Foot-­Prints of Truth; Or, Voice of Humanity devoted most of its illustrations, mostly by his friend Chapman (Hagen painted his portrait in the year the book was published), to Hagen’s epic poem “The Demon Picture Gallery.” The engraver was McRae, Chapman’s later partner on Revolutionary War scenes; Hagen too would write “Ballads of the Revolution” after the Civil War. The picture gallery, however, was not a stand-­in for a historical survey or painting. Thanks to the efforts of those promoting an American art that featured distinctively American subjects, the imagined picture gallery became a genre for commenting on America’s social ills in the 1850s. Perhaps because painting was associated with the promotion of national unity and harmony, the imaginary gallery was especially effective for demonstrating how mainstream culture minimized or swept under the rug social problems and discrimination. A writer for the Anglo African used it to critique America as a slave society, and a writer for the Jewish Asmonean used it to attack the

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Protestant bias of American culture, with a special dig at the popularity of the Düsseldorf school of art, whose painters famously heroized Protestant martyrs.28 Hagen’s dream gallery did the same. A vaulted hall, it was lit by demon artists’ eyes, and by their light, the pictures of human misery, crime, and vice had a fearful reality. The intent of the ensuing ekphrasis was to shock the reader or viewer, who did not normally see such pictures, into benevolent action. The illustrations were by no means realist, but they crossed boundaries of decorum for some viewers (fig. 40). The Unitarian Christian Inquirer found Hagen’s larger-­than-­life demons too hideous for art and Chapman’s portrayal of the Lost One (Hagen says God will forgive her), a voluptuous “fallen” woman a little like those in Odd Fellows’ illustrations, in rags in a cell, ridiculous. But they admired Hagen’s philanthropic spirit. The more secular Literary World considered Hagen’s poetry mere kindly sentiments, but found Chapman’s illustration of “Fanaticism” powerful: it illustrates those who condemn any who do not follow their own “gloomy path.”29 In it, a winged gargoyle presides over men in monastic clothing sentencing men to torture, and the role of the authoritarian state is indicated by the background vignette,

Figure 40. Left: John McRae after Frederick A. Chapman, “Opening Scene of The Demon ­Picture Gallery,” frontispiece. Right: William Walcutt, “Closing Scene of The Demon Picture Gallery,” after 28. John Cole Hagen, Foot-Prints of Truth; Or, Voice of Humanity (New York: Cornish, Lamport & Co., 1853). Public domain; images provided by Internet Archive and the Library of Congress.

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Figure 41. John McRae after Frederick A. Chapman, left: “Infidelity,” after 12; and right: ­“ Fanaticism,” after 14. John Cole Hagen, Foot-Prints of Truth; Or, Voice of Humanity (New York: Cornish, Lamport & Co., 1853). Public domain; images provided by Internet Archive and the Library of Congress.

where a man on a “fiery charger,” in glittering steel, is attended by millions, the slaves of his will. This statement of the collaboration of church and state on oppression of the masses was paired with Chapman’s illustration of “Infidelity,” in which a modern scientist, a learned astronomer, tramples on the Bible, even as he opens volumes on art (fig. 41). But because chance is his only God, he cannot understand who created Nature’s laws, so his research destroys Innocence (a woman, of course). Walcutt did the endpiece for the poem, with Love and Truth on a cloud, looking remarkably like Mary and Christ, bringing sunlight that casts the fiery vision of the demons into the darkness (fig. 40). The demons cower and writhe, crushing and hiding their palettes, their eyes covered or dark holes. The human vision that they represent—their terrible “pictures” are the ones created by human actions and actors—is replaced by God’s vision, and so the demons shrink to their proper insignificant scale. Hagen believed that the role of art was to bring urgency and pathos to human suffering, to encourage readers and viewers to amend it. In his “song of the artist” he describes a faithful band of brothers who cast the halo of the ideal around the real, in

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order to do so. Cranch’s illustration of the “Graphic Muse” in Foot-­Prints further instructs us that while she is voiceless, Art can color and draw the same harmonies as her sisters Music and Poetry, and thus she can give the same ideas life and teach men to turn from false idols toward the good.30 Gathered around her brush are history’s heroes and sages, gods and nymphs, but also women and putti who hover above, suggesting the presence and uplifting role of the spiritual (see fig. 46). Moral didacticism in art is paired with the belief that the spirit of the age is progress and reform: nations have awoken from the thralldom of the past (one Hagen poem celebrates Young Ireland), ruining kings and tyrants, and a purer religion is coming forth, on a mission of universal brotherhood among all the races. The genius of liberty will erase the blot of slavery from the American flag and restore the cross as the sign of union. This same transcendental idealism of Hagen’s Voice of Humanity underwrote Parke Godwin’s lecture on the “Church of Humanity.” A translator of German philosophers, Godwin argued in the lecture that following cooperative principles of association would lead to the final perfection of mankind.31 America’s Own, in noticing Godwin’s speech, classed it with one by George Lippard, a founder of the workers’ Order of the Brotherhood of the Union. The fraternalism and spiritualism that backed all these visions of cooperative humanity—Parke Godwin spoke at the opening of Walcutt’s American Artist’s Association—also encouraged the energetic and fanciful demons that filled the poet’s dreams, as well as their cousins in fantasy, the fairies in Lilac at the Door and Walcutt’s other illustrations. Walcutt, like several other Sketch Club members, became a fairy illustrator. Nicola Bown’s comprehensive study of fairies points to why: they are associated not only with nature (as free from civilized rules, like the forested “west” of native-­born brotherhood that Orton and Walcutt imagined) and the common folk of the preindustrial era (the same origins as artisanal culture), but with transcendentalism. Their wings (on human bodies) suggest not just the imagination’s flights of fancy, but the ability to rise above nature— into the past, into a divine order, even into a reassuringly controllable miniature world.32 In the U.S., most publishers and illustrators of fairy books were also associated with Protestant religious books. They both asserted the existence of universal (albeit Protestant) spiritual ideals. And more than the classical women on cemetery monuments, fairies suggested a more natural and so more authentically popular language for expressing moral truths. Harper’s issued one of the first fairy tale books in the U.S. in 1836, with eighty illustrations. The Odd Fellow organ the Golden Rule praised it and described itself as “inexpressibly fond of fairies.” Inevitably, in the same

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column, the publication also praised anti-­Catholic polemicist C. Sparry’s Papacy in the 19th Century; or, Popery.33 Harper’s many illustrated books, especially its Protestant (“American”) Bible with its 1,400 pictures, provided a training ground for engravers, many of whom would continue to be associated with nativist presses, and so with fairy books, including William Howland, the Orr brothers, and Benson Lossing. Harper’s itself continued to publish illustrated fairy books, including one by Richard H. Stoddard, who was a signer of Agnes Walcutt’s autograph book. Stoddard wrote Adventures in Fairy-­Land, illustrated by Johannes Oertel, who designed a masthead for America’s Own—Lossing, of course, was the engraver. Sketch Club member John McLenan illustrated honorary member Cornelius Mathews’s Indian Fairy Book. While it’s not precisely a fairy tale, Sketch Club member Joseph Kyle’s gigantic panorama of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a subject that was understood by Catholics as intrinsically anti-­Catholic, employed ardently Protestant artists like Huntington and his student Edward May, English-­born son of a Dutch Reformed minister, the latter of whom would later collaborate with Walcutt.34 Protestant narratives of progress like Bunyan’s were prone to the same sort of allegoricizing that led to spirits inhabiting the world in the illustrations that Kyle’s son-­in-­law, Sketch Club member Jacob Dallas, did for William Fosdick’s book of poems, Ariel. Dallas displayed the full vocabulary of winged, scantily clad, and diaphanous women (as muses, angels, seraphs, or fairies), winged birds or insects, and both human-­sized and miniature people in feathered and flowered costumes (evoking Shakespeare’s and ­Edmund Spenser’s era and so too an Anglo-­A merican tradition), all amid delicate arching tendrils of foliage and flowers. Humor and sex are part of it—Sketch Club member Fosdick mocks Mesmerism in his poems, and his fairies have swelling bosoms—but the underlying concept is of a natural world given moral meaning by spirits and the spiritual, thanks to the imaginative power of the artist. When Dallas represents that power with somewhat androgynous, kindred spirits, the scene is lighthearted; when a patriarch like King Oberon is introduced, so too are shadows and hierarchy among the fairies (fig. 42).35 As is evident, the artists in the Sketch Club and in Walcutt’s circle were deeply involved in illustration.36 With no international copyright, American publishers made most of their money issuing English books, sometimes with new illustrations, and most of the weekly papers had illustrated stories, often also pirated. Sketch Club exercises, which picked British literary sources for the artists’ various interpretations, undoubtedly prepared them to illustrate these imports. Of course, it also encouraged them to consider literary subjects

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Figure 42. Whitney & Jocelyn after Jacob Dallas, illustrations, William W. Fosdick, Ariel (New York: Bunce & Brother, 1855), frontispiece (left), and after 39 (right). Public domain; ­images provided by the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress.

for their paintings. But that wasn’t the only effect of Sketch Club drills. Plain Dealer editor and Walcutt friend Charles Browne, better known as Artemus Ward, described Walcutt’s Sketch Club in Cleveland as regularly giving life to abstract concepts.37 For the subject “life,” Walcutt provided a butterfly crawling out of a chrysalis—a nice example of new, or reborn, life. The butterfly, a small, winged creature, was frequently found among the fairies and was also a symbol of the soul (and so the spiritual life) for poets like Hagen and Walcutt. C. D. Stuart, in a spiritualist journal, for that matter described the spirit “of the Age” as one of transition, best compared to the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, as peasants transform into kings.38 For the subject “truth,” five of the sketches showed the Bible, one showed the Plain Dealer, and one a “Negro preaching.” This practice, of the artists trying to express abstract ideas visually, without reliance on standard allegories, suggests the origin for both the New York Sketch Club’s fairy paintings and their humorous genre pictures of ordinary present-­day life.

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Walcutt’s and James Cafferty’s illustrations for Charles Burkhardt’s Fairy Tales and Legends of Many Nations are a good example of this crossover, as they look more like genre scenes than Dallas’s fantasies.39 Burkhardt, like Godwin, translated German writers like Friedrich Schiller, but his interest in fairy tales came less from a transcendentalist impulse to spiritualize nature and more from the desire to equate nation, or national culture, with race. The emergence of folklore books with legends and fairy tales in Germany and Britain has often been tied to the quest for an authentic, popular, national identity, even as the genre itself, a written version of oral stories, insisted on the reader’s distance from this preindustrial past. Burkhardt’s selections fit this, in that he translated fairy tales that would in subject, style, and diction express national character because they were the products not of the demands of a commercial market (like modern literature), but of ordinary people living in specific locales. Thus Anglo-­Saxon readers know Little Red Riding Hood, and Germanic ones know Blocksberg. At the same time, his selection of “many nations” rather than just one tradition might seem to contradict the idea that he was looking to construct an authentic folk or national ancestry; his title implies that in the U.S. the many nations are united. But the search for an American folk was always based on contrast, or on boundaries drawn with other cultures through encounters found in genre paintings or books like Burkhardt’s.40 Indeed, the selected stories are all set in Northern Europe except for three, set in ancient Greece, Italy, and Spain. The latter two, as Catholic countries, naturally feature murderous kings. The effect of this emphasis on ethnicity on the illustrations in the book is that most of them resemble genre paintings in their composition—scenes of common people was the genre for displaying national “folk” character, usually by comic contrasts. The frontispiece departs from this, though. It tries to create a more universal landscape and in proposing that fables are not national but universal, the design shifts from genre conventions to the style of fairy pictures. Most of the creatures in it are feminine and winged, but there are two kings (one turned upside down—kings belong to folk culture and so to past preindustrial traditions), and a few demon-­like creatures, all springing out of a base of flowers, leaves, and snails (fig. 43). The effect is of natural abundance, a profusion of fertile fancies, perhaps not unlike butterflies emerging from a chrysalis. Burkhardt was a music and theater critic who freelanced for the New York Schnellpost, the Albion, the Morning Telegraph, and the Union magazine (while it was illustrated by Tompkins Matteson). Since 1849 Burkhardt had been an editor at the Sunday Dispatch, exercising broader control of the paper after 1856 as a proprietor. Burkhardt was himself an immigrant who married

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Figure 43. Left: Frontispiece, Charles Burkhardt, Fairy Tales of Many Nations (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1850). Right: frontispiece engraved by William Howland, Parke Godwin, Vala (New York: George P. Putnam, 1851). Public domain; images provided by author.

a concert singer, Catharine Mears, to whom he dedicated his 1848 Fairy Tales. He was involved with fundraising for the Irish Catholic priest Father Mathew, an advocate of total abstinence from drink, which would seem to suggest religious tolerance. But Mathew’s tour of the U.S. was supported primarily by Protestant reformers, from anti-­Catholic minister Lyman Beecher to John Brougham, who was known for reciting his speeches (and whose fairy tale O’Flannigan and the Fairies was a temperance drama), and it seems that Burkhardt shared similar views. Under his management, the Dispatch endorsed Millard Fillmore (the Know-­Nothing candidate) for president, warning that the Whigs would lose unless they embraced “Americanism.” He also supported Protestant filibuster William Walker’s effort to take over Nicaragua and received Washington correspondence for the paper from Thomas R. Whitney, by this time a congressman. William Dunnel’s execution of the designs for Fairy Tales was called clumsy, but the illustrators were praised for their artistic taste (fig. 44). The publishers were praised for employing American artists.41 Perhaps the artistic quality lay in the atmosphere of the past that they conjured, comparable to popular genre paintings set in Cromwell’s or Elizabethan England. Sketch

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Figure 44. Top: William N. Dunnel after James Cafferty, “The Picture of the Lord,” between 198 and 199. Bottom: William Walcutt?, “Dom Pedro ­Commits a Double Murder,” between 266 and 267, Charles Burkhardt, Fairy Tales of Many Nations (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1850). Public domain; images provided by author.

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Club president Cafferty’s “Picture of the Lord” illustrates the only tale not given a specific location. The story is of a pious village artist, Benjamin, son of a pastor, who leaves his country village for Rome, a tale that might to readers acquainted with the arts suggest the eighteenth-­century American artist Benjamin West. In Rome, the hero is seduced by the devil into painting luxurious, voluptuous pictures, full of bitterness and mockery of men and manners, which are greatly attractive to the dissolute. He returns home to die, but when he sees his early picture of Jesus (a very human-­looking portrait in Cafferty’s handling) and prays in front of it, he realizes he is forgiven for his misdeeds. Cafferty shows the kneeling, healthy-­looking artist gazing at his first masterpiece, his purest if not his most artistic one, and though there is a suggestion that the beams of sunlight in the room may radiate from the painting as much as they would from a window, it conjures little of a spiritual realm. Walcutt did not sign his illustrations in the book, but one that might be his is equally unfairylike. In it, Dom Pedro, the slender, cruel king of Spain, coldly observes the bodies of the two innocent men he has slain, while a woman with very much the body type of J. R. Orton’s heroine weeps in a plain domestic interior. Burkhardt follows up this “legend” with an addendum critical of the Catholic Church in Spain for letting its murdering priests off too lightly, and his fairy tale from Catholic Italy features an even more inhuman king. Only Burkhardt’s title page and a few endpieces suggest a fairy world that mingles the grotesque and the natural (see fig. 43). The linear and more whimsical style employed for these framing elements was popularized in the U.S. by Felix O. C. Darley. Darley, born to English parents, was “discovered” in Philadelphia by Thomas Butler Gunn, mentioned earlier as a satirist for Brougham’s Lantern. Gunn was a British cartoonist who admired the young artist’s pictures of working-­class men on the street, loafers, firemen, and drunks, some of which then appeared in the Democratic Review.42 Darley’s outline sketches illustrating humorist Washington Irving (he did Cooper in 1859) made him widely admired. The idea of “outlines” came from artists like Moritz Retzch, an illustrator for transcendentalist Schiller among others, and William Henry Brooke, who illustrated several British fairy tale books.43 The style freed designers from the burden Dunnel faced of making shading in a realistic woodcut look graceful. Its linear abstraction suited it for a fantasy world like Irving conjured for his Knickerbockers, and Darley’s style supplied a certain additional exuberance. He was much in demand for comic and fanciful stories and poems, illustrating T. B. Thorpe’s Mysteries of the Backwoods, Ned Buntline’s stories in the Sunday Mercury, a Christmas story by minister Jedidiah V. Huntington, brother to artist Daniel Huntington, George

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Copway’s autobiography, a Duganne poem in Holden’s Dollar Magazine, and George P. Morris’s poems.44 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, whose artists and editors knew Walcutt personally, did not compare Walcutt to the celebrated Darley, but they described his “masterly” outline drawings as attracting attention and praise for their power and individuality. Those qualities are most evident in his illustrations for another allegorical fairy tale, Parke Godwin’s Vala, a mythical retelling of singer Jenny Lind’s life and trip to America. George P. Putnam, who had hired Darley for a Washington Irving edition, published Godwin’s fantasy in 1851. The group of illustrators involved with Vala reflect Godwin’s ties to transcendentalism and Associationism. In addition to Walcutt, there was Godwin’s friend Thomas W. Whitley, a British landscape artist and editor involved in communal living schemes. Like Walcutt, Whitley was active in founding cooperative organizations for artists in both Ohio and New York, including the early stages of the American Artists Association, and he also had Know-­Nothing connections, working on the short-­lived Young Sam. Thomas Hicks, a portrait painter, Associationist, and good friend of Godwin’s fellow Putnam’s Magazine editors, was also employed. So was Thomas P. Rossiter, a wealthy artist who received an entrée into New York from his New Haven neighbor Samuel Morse, and later one from Cooper.45 Rossiter was close to Hicks and generally to artists favored by Godwin’s Democratic Evening Post (where Vala was initially published), who like him were among the founders of the elite Century Club. Godwin, a son of a New Jersey manufacturer, in other words, was no artisan, though he shared the workingman’s critique that industrialization threatened to turn men into slaves. Rossiter’s 1841 picture of his studio in Paris indicates the more elevated circles in which he and Godwin moved (fig. 45). Rossiter formed a sketch club in Paris with his friends and would later do the same in Rome. His painting of his studio, with the club members in it, has a decorum and a devotion to old masters entirely missing in Hasenclever’s studio (Rossiter disliked the Düsseldorf style), or descriptions of the New York Sketch Club’s studio revels (see fig. 19). Women are not members but models for the artist, who is in the center, at work transforming the real into the ideal, bracketed by his fellow artists, including historical painter John Vanderlyn on the guitar and portraitist G. P. A. Healy at the far right. Several other artists favored by the Evening Post, including Durand and Francis Edmonds, gaze politely around. Enclosing the group of contemporary artists are Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, on the center table, warning them against low realism; Titian’s Entombment on the back wall, a reminder of their piety; and a Jean-­ Antoine Houdon sculpture (L’Ecorché) reflected in the mirror, sending the

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Figure 45. Thomas P. Rossiter, Studio Reception, Paris, 1841, oil on canvas, 32 × 39 5/8 inches, Albany Institute of History and Art. Public domain; image provided by Wikimedia Commons.

message that these modern artists would continue to mirror Houdon’s Enlightenment classicism, albeit genteelly adapted to the upper-­class, Protestant parlor.46 Rossiter had a reputation for imitating the old masters (pointed out critically by Odd Fellow L. G. Clark at the Knickerbocker). His biblical and allegorical pictures, like Huntington’s, usually featured idealized women and detached these moral subjects from an American setting in a way that Lockwood, with his George Washington presiding over a Last Judgment, did not. Rossiter himself did ten pictures of George Washington, but his most famous ones showed the general at home. That emphasis on female subjects and domesticity, apparent in his studio, reflects an upper-­class viewpoint that may have been anti-­market but was not precisely artisanal. The home, like the artisan’s fraternal order, was a site for expressing anti-­industrial values and offered a metaphor for community, but its gender and other seemingly natural hierarchies, its very privacy, distanced it from brotherly mutualism. Perhaps the distance between his style and that of fraternal artisans is indicated by

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the young men at the YMCA poking out the eyes of his group portrait of the great commercial “merchants of America.”47 Rossiter in some ways, then, was an outlier to the circles Walcutt moved in, though when Walcutt was in France the two encountered each other in the expatriate community. He joined Walcutt and the Sketch Club artists in the petition to welcome Kossuth, so he shared some Young America sentiments, including willingness to include immigrants in the Republic.48 His Civil War–era allegory, Liberty Freeing the Shackles of Slavery and Sheltering the Emigrant, has one of his beautiful blonde women, haloed by the thirteen stars of the original colonies on the American flag, symmetrically framed by a pleading Black man in a loincloth and a nursing white mother. But in the years leading up to the war, Rossiter became most famous for his series of pictures of nativist idol George Washington, including one with Lafayette at Mount Vernon that might easily have evoked (at least for certain viewers) the Frenchman’s supposed warning against Catholic priests. Rossiter included a copy of the 1784 Pennsylvania Gazette to indicate that Lafayette and Washington were discussing “an issue of the day.”49 Many of his other subjects, like the Puritan’s Daughter, the Puritans of New England, the Judges of Charles 1st (regicides given sanctuary in Puritan New England), and Puritan minister Davenport Preaching under an Oak, fit into the effort to locate American origins in the Anglo-­Protestant and New England tradition. His series of pictures set in old New Haven were done for a Sabbatarian and ancestor-­ worshipper featured in a Know-­Nothing newspaper.50 Putnam’s assembly of artists for Vala perhaps conveyed that Godwin was writing more of an allegory of art than a modern fairy tale or legend. Rossiter, who did all the initials for the book, provided lovely if sometimes anatomically dubious young women to represent Lind/Vala as well as decorative if extraneous mermaids and fairies riding swans. He also did the endpiece, “Glory Forever to Art,” which rather literally emblazons the word “art” on a cloud-­ wrapped globe, the latter resembling one of the Odd Fellow’s symbols—Odd Fellow J. W. Orr engraved it. Angelic women—winged, but full size or larger— bring the (implicitly divine, and timeless) glory to art. The effect, while more grandiose, is similar to Cranch’s “Graphic Muse” for Hagen’s Foot-­Prints (fig. 46). Hagen’s muse of the visual arts provides among her other heavenly comforts decorated fairy bowers, even to the “insect’s painted wing.”51 Godwin’s frontispiece, engraved by William Howland, is more in the style of Dallas’s illustrations for Ariel, filled with cavorting fairies intertwined with leaves, or Burkhardt’s frontispiece (see fig. 43). The human heroine, Vala, the stand-­in for Jenny Lind, is elevated above them, but is still imagined as emerging from their more vernacular world of spiritualized nature.

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Figure 46. Left: John McRae after Christopher P. Cranch, “Graphic Muse,” John Cole Hagen, Foot-Prints of Truth; Or, Voice of Humanity (New York: Cornish, Lamport & Co., 1853), ­between 64 and 65. Public domain; image provided by Internet Archive and the Library of Congress. Right: John W. Orr after Thomas P. Rossiter, “Glory Forever to Art,” Parke Godwin, Vala (New York: George P. Putnam, 1851), endpiece. Public domain; image provided by author.

Walcutt’s illustrations similarly immerse Vala in fairy land, while also keeping her apart.52 His picture of the young Jenny Lind, while portraying her as quite a conventional-­looking little girl, surrounds her with a wilder Nordic environment of flowers, waterfalls, birds, and winged fairies (fig. 47, top). Nature (or its spirits) teaches her to sing, as in Burkhardt’s tale of “Fiddling Jackey,” in which a little boy is taught music by the birds. When a slightly older Vala hears the “voice of art” telling her to pursue a singing career, the illustrators still rely on the vocabulary of fairies to embody the idea of a divine calling, something a spiritualist might hear, just as Hagen called on the Voice of Humanity, or Thorpe spoke as a Voice to America. Even in a prosaic domestic scene meant to convey that Vala’s humble parents don’t understand her genius, Walcutt adjusts the scale to give the caged bird metaphor—a girl isolated at the top of a very long staircase—a sense of a fantasy world, like the play with scale in miniaturized fairylands, where human bodies and birds and insects seem to mingle (fig. 47, bottom). Later,

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Figure 47. John W. Orr after William Walcutt, illustrations, Parke Godwin, Vala (New York: George P. Putnam, 1851), 10 (top), 13 (bottom). Public domain; images provided by author.

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in his illustrations to a travel book on France, he would adapt some of the same techniques to humorously suggest a peculiarly foreign world. Walcutt’s best illustrations adapt the intricacy and detail of the organic fairy world, its animation of objects, to represent the mad and magical world of the theater. When Vala goes to the great metropolis to study with a master “song-­smith,” the musical instruments come alive—something they will do only for the gifted (fig. 48). And when she is invited to the theater for her first concert, Walcutt’s backstage pandemonium, with scenery, costumes, and props hooked to strange pulleys, captures not a hell, but the world turned upside down. Stewpans and burnished armor, cardinals, and clowns are all equated, and the common and commonplace are made glorious (fig. 49). It is much more exciting and livelier than either the placid nature of Vala’s youth or the domestic realm. It is a kingdom that only genius like Lind’s can enter, however. The only scholar to analyze Godwin’s Vala argues persuasively that it represented a cosmopolitan view of the glory of art (as per Rossiter’s endpiece),

Figure 48. William Walcutt, illustration, Parke Godwin, Vala (New York: George P. Putnam, 1851), 26. Public domain; image provided by author.

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Figure 49. Bobbett and Edmonds after William Walcutt, illustration, Parke Godwin, Vala (New York: George P. Putnam, 1851), 33. Public domain; image provided by author.

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in which Lind’s natural genius is not national, like Burkhardt’s ethnic fairy tales, but world-­scale. As Gustavus Stadler observes, Godwin is nonetheless clear that Lind is “northern”—not Swedish per se, but from “Norland,” a region that Rossiter represents as a cross in the mountains; it is home to a Scandinavian people, because Godwin is writing an Icelandic saga. Godwin traces Vala back to the Vikings, whom he credits for discovering America.53 The one illustration in the book by landscape painter Whitley, a Protestant immigrant from Britain, was an emblematic one of a Viking ship—its sails looking like wings, allying it with the spirit—in danger of crashing on sharp rocks in high seas, but with a distant land, America, glowing in light, beckoning (fig. 50). These Teutonic peoples are then the founders of New England and its republicanism. Stadler notes that when Godwin was writing in 1851, in the wake of the failed revolutions in France and Italy, the success of American republicanism seemed to some to be because of this “northern” racial inheritance, which set it apart from Catholic or southern Europe. The northern genius of Vala, like those fleeing these failed civil wars, is driven from her feudal European homeland, which Godwin characterizes as an unequal mix of folk villages and overpoweringly gorgeous palaces. In his version of Europe’s capitalist cities, a class of repulsive, deformed, begrimed men labor for their

Figure 50. William Howland after Thomas W. Whitley, illustration, Parke Godwin, Vala (New York: George P. Putnam, 1851), 3. Public domain; image provided by author.

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fortunate brothers, culminating in a Battle of Foul Faiths, Bloody Rites, Lies, and Oppressions. Thomas Hicks’s illustration of the battle has a knight riding rampant—a very threatening foreshortening sends his horse plunging toward the viewer—and cloaked men at prayer before a crucifixion, as well as a bare-­ chested man performing a beheading, and a blind liberty ignoring the pleas of a shackled Black man (fig. 51). Hicks suggests the international or universal character of this dark human struggle, but despite the reference to slavery, Vala leaves this land of inequality for what Godwin calls a new Earth: America and freedom. There she conquers men, women, and children, from New England to California, creating a realm of heavenly harmony, “e pluribus unum.”54 Godwin imagines that harmonious society as a “lofty” circle of friends, whose love for music and song brings them together, but his illustrators can only conceive of this in neoclassical terms, reverting to leopards and putti, bacchantes and river gods.

Figure 51. Thomas Hicks, ­illustration, Parke Godwin, Vala (New York: George P. Putnam, 1851), 41. Public ­domain; image provided by author.

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The harmony of this union comes from its egalitarian social relations, but as Stadler argues, to achieve this Godwin creates a white, Northern union that excludes the South and “blackness” generally. The music critics who hailed Jenny Lind as an improving influence on American song were no admirers of African American music, which might be national and American, but was not genius.55 To some African American activists, alienated from the U.S., this kind of cosmopolitan concept of genius, musical or otherwise, found a home in England, as the nation where educated Black intellectuals were recognized as citizens by the aristocracy. Their anglophilia more than the Sketch Club’s was an antislavery Anglo-­Saxonism—the cultural superiority of Godwin’s Northmen came from their also being the first abolitionists.56 By contrast, the Young America cultural nationalists (among whom one might count the Know-­Nothings) who promoted native-­born American genius often recognized the merits of Black music as a native art form, albeit most often in appropriated forms like minstrelsy. To be distinctively American for them was to include African Americans and Native Americans, in a hierarchy rather than a neoclassical utopia, and Walcutt did so, in his illustrations of contemporary life for Young America nativists like Cornelius Mathews and in his historical paintings of the break with the English caste system.

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The illustrations by Darley, Walcutt, and Dallas for Cornelius Mathews’s Chanticleer, his Thanksgiving novel, convey a native version of American national genius, not the cosmopolitan ideal of Godwin. Mathews was a New York playwright, editor, and satirist who gave the term “Young America” broader currency in 1845 in a speech calling for “nationality and true Americanism in the books this country furnishes.”1 Mathews was an advocate for an international copyright to protect American authors, a tariff of sorts to keep Dickens and other popular British and European writers from costing less than books copyrighted in the U.S. His speech promoting U.S. authors is usually interpreted in terms of that goal. But his call for true Americanism in the year of the Native American Party’s first big electoral success in New York hints at his politics. As early as 1840, he was warning about foreigners becoming citizens and Catholic efforts to combat Protestant hegemony, as well as the tendency of rich people to adopt the “American Composite Style,” the faulty imitation of Europe described by Cooper, over the simplicity of the pioneer log cabin Lossing identified as truly American in his History of Art. At the same time, Mathews urged an American school of “comic design,” pictures in which the ideal world is shadowed forth, or the actual world raised to a cheerful ideal, by exhibiting character in its grotesque and humorous phases.2 The artists in the Sketch Club helped fill in those shadows. Darley’s frontispiece for 1853’s Chanticleer portrays a family reconciling around the dinner table (fig. 52). The gathering of the happy family is like the re-­unified states (in the wake of Clay’s Compromise of 1850), with prodigal would-­be secessionists returned to a virtuous Union. Their society and unity are anchored by the past, their common origins, in the form of the deeply 108

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Figure 52. John W. Orr after F. O. C. Darley, “The Thanksgiving Dinner,” Cornelius Mathews, Chanticleer: A Thanksgiving Story (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1853), frontispiece. Public domain; image provided by Rutgers University.

religious patriarch, a Revolutionary War veteran, whom Darley places against the hearth, head bowed in prayer. The turkey, with its associations with the land and the domestication of wild, formerly feathered Indians, links the country’s founding by the New England family’s Puritan ancestors to the nation’s present-­day occupation of western territories. But its death, put into the foreground where the whole bird lies on the table, is also a symbol of ritual sacrifice for the Union. The grandfather’s home is filled with other references to the nation’s martyrs, especially those of 1776. One son, an Ohio politician, is always studying the Signing of the Declaration of Independence, which is imprinted on his handkerchief. A “highly colored” (a pun on Trumbull’s historical liberties in constructing battle scenes) picture of General Warren at Bunker Hill in Boston hangs in the kitchen, where it balances one of Southern general Francis Marion in his tent, eating a potato.3 Mathews, like Cooper, directs some humor toward the “Yankee” tendency to commercialize and commodify the sacred, but the effect nonetheless is that these ordinary (not noble) people, are observant of tradition.

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In Darley’s illustration, a print of Trumbull’s Signing of the Declaration of Independence may be just visible, framed, on the back wall. Next to it, in the liminal space of the doorway, the maid brings in a giant pumpkin pie, and her image of nurture and nature is aligned with the mother embracing her long-­lost son. All eyes are on the embracing pair, except the servant, who can’t see them, and the patriarch, who gazes downward in prayer. Walcutt’s illustration, however, shows the maid, Mopsey, alone in the kitchen, pulling the pie out of the oven (fig. 53). The chromolithograph on this wall may be meant to suggest General Marion and his potato, but the rest of the setting is utilitarian. Mopsey is caricatured in the book and illustrations in a way

Figure 53. John W. Orr after William Walcutt, “Mopsey Putting the Pies in the Oven,” Cornelius Mathews, Chanticleer: A Thanksgiving Story (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1853). Public domain; image provided by Rutgers University.

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Figure 54. John W. Orr after Tompkins H. Matteson, ­illustration for “Wilfred ­Montressor, or The Secret Order of the Seven,” Golden Rule, August 29, 1846, 133. Public domain; image provided by author.

that the white New Englanders, even the ones Mathews is satirizing, like the Ohio politician, aren’t; they remain smoothly drawn and sentimental. Her dialect, too, is less polished than that of her employers, the Peabodys, and her behavior more foolish. This kind of caricature is familiar from many printed materials, whether illustrated stories in the Odd Fellows papers or sheet music (fig. 54). Even abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe treated characters like Topsy (presumably the source for Mathews’s name) as comic figures, with attendant exaggerations. With his novel set in New England, Mathews could have chosen other stereotypes, such as a white country (i.e., a “rustic”) woman, or even an Irish woman, to act as the family’s servant. That he did not speaks to a desire to avoid intra-­racial class conflict, but also to the book’s metaphors: the family he describes—if it wants to keep antislavery Ohio and New England in the Union with Marion’s South Carolina— must include African Americans. Darley avoided the problem of a comic type interrupting the sober emotions of the dinner by positioning her in the shadowy background. Walcutt, in creating a kitchen scene, had more freedom to exploit the idea of Mopsey both as comic and as closer to nature than the refined Peabodys. With the perspective slightly askew and the birds pecking at the floor, as well as the kitchen equipment’s array of exaggeratedly round shapes, the picture has a degree of animation and perhaps sexuality. Mopsey’s role in the novel is, with

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the prodigal son’s mother and abandoned girlfriend, to support the absent heir. Where the Peabody grandfather, a symbol of law and order, erred in originally condemning his wayward grandson, Mopsey, closer to nature, remained loyal. Something of the same idea of loyalty to a union as being a matter of natural feeling is conveyed, albeit more genteelly, in Jacob Dallas’s contribution to the volume. In “The Lovers,” the son, returning to marry his faithful sweetheart, is aligned with the mountains, trees, and moon. Other Sketch Club members helped create similar rural New England environments. Konrad Huber engraved a Unitarian minister’s temperance novel, Margaret, set in a village like Chanticleer’s, and Darley donated the designs for it. The novel was published by Redfield, Mathews’s publisher and a publisher for Burkhardt and Savage.4 The regionalism of writers and artists who specialized in western or New England themes, whether Sketch Club members like Hagen, Walcutt (who also sketched in Vermont), F. A. Chapman, Stearns, Mathews (who wrote a book of American Indian legends), Thorpe, Fosdick, or Tait, or their collaborators like Darley or Rossiter, was not as far removed from fairy painting as it might seem. That is, like Mathews promoting Thanksgiving or Godwin the Norland, it was part of the same effort to establish an imaginary region that was understood as white, Anglo-­ Saxon, and Protestant, and its customs and habits, its folk, as the national character.5 Ingesting the Thanksgiving turkey in Mathews, like shooting the Christmas turkey in Cooper, were rituals of assimilation. These comic, rustic regional designs, like Cooper’s frontier, could include African American and American Indian people. As Thomas R. Whitney argued, not only were colored people patriotic and more intelligent than most immigrants, but the first blood shed in the American Revolution was theirs, and so they belonged as citizens. Whitney’s Republic praised Chanticleer as a good story well told, with a good moral, and Copway’s American Indian favorably noticed its illustrations.6 Chanticleer, the rooster of Mathews’s title, crows on the title page (fig. 55, left) and watches Mopsey from the door in Walcutt’s illustration. He is another symbol of natural loyalty to the wayward son, but for some readers and viewers, he would have summoned thoughts of both antislavery and the nativist “Wide Awakes.” Chanticleer was the vain cock of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales whose crowing gets him nabbed by a fox. Political writers ever since had used him either as a warning or to suggest that he sounded a clarion call, the start of a new era. Something of that latter meaning lies behind the plumed rooster that a friend of Walcutt’s at the Plain Dealer used to celebrate Democrat Stephen Douglas’s local victory over the Republicans (fig. 55, right). The Plain Dealer’s rooster is from the English children’s rhyme

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Figure 55. Left: Title page, Cornelius Mathews, Chanticleer: A Thanksgiving Story (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1853). Public domain; image provided by Rutgers University. Right: “This is the Cock that Crowed in the Morn,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 2, 1859, 2. Public domain; image provided by author.

“The House that Jack Built,” but it has a similar sense of a wake-­up call: “This is the cock that crowed in the morn / that waked the priest all shaven and shorn.” The nursery rhyme was easy to allegorize, and a satire making the rounds of the newspapers in 1855, the year of Know-­Nothing electoral victories, equated “Sam” with the cock that crowed.7 This cock called for the rise of Sam, or Young America’s Democratic leader Stephen Douglas, but perhaps because of the chicken’s association with African Americans, he could also call for the end of slavery. Jacob Chapman, a Democrat, began the Indianapolis paper the Chanticleer in 1853, signaling his shift to the antislavery Republicans.8 In Mathews, the rooster’s silver call announces the happy reunion of the family, the return of the son (rather than the sun) from California, which had entered the Union as a free state as a result of the 1850 Compromise. The grandfather sums up the republic’s resulting future path to happiness and peace. It will be the dawn of a new day, along Young America and Protestant

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lines: he urges the family “to love your dear Native Land” and pray its sunlight will “spread hence to the farthest lands and seas,” with all the people of the earth in “common fellowship of our blessed Saviour.”9 The rooster, perched on the open half door leading to Mopsey in Walcutt’s illustration, promises an end to domestic slavery (if not to Black labor), too. It’s a utopian and religious vision of America not so different in its message from Godwin’s divine glory spreading northern Art around the world, or Hagen’s endorsement of native origins: “Until man’s birth-­place seem’d to be / Almost, another Heaven.”10 No wonder Whitney approved of the moral. Walcutt’s style, at its most energetic, was closer to the mode of his friends who illustrated the comic magazines, the style recommended by Mathews in his proposal for American art, than to the spiritualists’ allegorical muses of global art and religion. In what are probably John McLenan’s 1856 designs for Young America—a title that by that date increasingly referred to Stephen Douglas Democrats, not the distribution of public lands in the west—there are no fairies as such.11 But the vein of satire, expressed in miniature human allegories of sarcasm, wit, and fun, who are kept busy killing humbug, sin, corruption, and error, brings out an assortment of demons, imps, and winged creatures, in a chaotic mass not unlike an inorganic (no flowers and twining branches) fairyland (fig. 56). The warlike baby personifying Young America ambitions, astride one of the noble eagles that adorned Odd Fellow and United American papers, itself mocks the idea of rejecting tradition as, in effect, childish. Young America was edited by Sketch Club songster Charles Gayler and published by T. W. Strong, who employed several Sketch Club artists in his ventures, including at his Illustrated American News, edited by C. D. Stuart, in an office next to Whitney’s Republic.12 Strong and Gayler may indeed have meant the title somewhat ironically. Young America leader Stephen Douglas’s role in the 1854 Kansas-­Nebraska Act, which permitted the expansion of slavery into Northern territory, drove away from the party many Democrats who had previously seen Douglas carrying the banner for domestic and international expansion. Those who remained, like Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, had to, albeit unhappily, accept slavery’s continued existence. The fallback was a skeptical third-­party position, reluctant to embrace either side. For example, in one of Young America’s “art” columns from this time, the author disapproves of the Republican New York Times’s art critic taking aim at the portraits of George Law, Know-­Nothing presidential candidate. These were portraits by Ohioans T. D. Jones and William Powell, the latter a Sketch Club guest and recipient of Democratic congressional patronage.13 But the writer is clearly no supporter of Law either, and suspects the artists themselves may

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Figure 56. Frontispiece, engraved by Thomas W. Strong, Young America, January 5, 1856. Public domain; image provided by author.

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have had mercenary intent. To accompany this puncturing of artistic and critical objectivity, John McLenan produces antic creatures of the imagination to populate the Art column’s header (fig. 57). They signal skepticism of representations of both the pen and the brush. They look like Walcutt’s spirits of music in Vala (see fig. 48), but rather than teaching or inspiring, they dive into the inkwell, seemingly to get drunk. Perhaps as an indication of McLenan’s sympathies with his Sketch Club friends, the position of the paintbrushes suggests the palette has wings, but the critic’s pen blocks its upward flight.

Figure 57. John McLenan, “Art and Artists,” Young America, ­January 5, 1856, 4. Public domain; image provided by author.

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Walcutt brought this comic style to Europe in his illustrations for a travel book by family friends from Ohio, Bell Smith Abroad, in which the humor served to reinforce an invidious comparison of American manners to French ones. The author, Louise Piatt, initially wrote the book as a series of sketches for George Morris’s Home Journal, and she fully inhabited the political and literary world of Democratic Young America. She was married to Donn Piatt, who had been appointed by Democratic president Franklin Pierce as a diplomat to Paris. Like Pierce’s other emissaries, Piatt was a firm supporter of international revolution, especially the movements of Young Ireland and Young Italy. In Paris, the Piatts spent time with Kossuth’s children, and when Piatt illegally issued a U.S. passport to a fugitive Italian revolutionary, Piatt excused himself by saying that he was “a citizen of my creation.”14 Nor were the couple anti-­Catholic. Though he was from a Presbyterian family, Donn went to a Catholic school and wrote for Cincinnati’s Catholic Telegraph. They were also antislavery, and Piatt helped Horace Greeley, a noted abolitionist, out of a French jail, despite his Democratic boss’s objections. By 1856 Piatt would because of this issue shift to the Republican Party, even though he did not believe in what his newspaper disparagingly called “Negro and White Equality.” He believed Black people were by nature inferior, and so not qualified for the vote or citizenship.15 Despite their cosmopolitan credentials, Louise Piatt’s book is largely a rejection of French culture and foreign influence generally. The Piatts arrived at the start of the Second Empire, and so their point of view was in part a principled democratic rejection of crowned heads and imperial rule. But it may have been reinforced by her social circle, which because of the language barrier (Donn Piatt learned French, of course) was mostly expatriates, many of them artists. At the Piatt home in Ohio, not far from Columbus, they had also been friendly with artists and poets, including Sketch Club members T. D. Jones, Fosdick, and McLenan.16 In Paris, Louise described socializing with G. P. A. Healy (who painted her portrait and visited the Piatts in Ohio), T. P. Rossiter, C. P. Cranch, and Edward May, the last an Odd Fellow contributor and historical painter. Healy was probably the most prominent of the resident artists, noted for his multiple royal commissions. He contributed a portrait of the year’s prettiest debutante at the French court to Louise’s book, and Walcutt copied Healy’s portrait of Henry Clay in the Louvre. Except perhaps for Cranch the transcendentalist, whom Donn Piatt had known since the early 1840s, the expatriates were dignified academic-­minded artists, as is evident in Rossiter’s portrait of his Paris studio (see fig. 45). Rossiter even condemned famed historical painter Thomas Couture, known for painting an orgiastic Romans of the Decadence, a demonstration of the collapse of

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ancient and modern classical republicanism, as insufficiently moral.17 At the 1855 Universal Exposition in France, an art exhibition that was firmly under French government and academic control, May, Rossiter, and Healy all won prizes, though David B. Walcutt’s Ohio picnic scene did not. However, judging by Bell Smith Abroad, the Piatts spent much more time with William Walcutt and his brother David Broderick Walcutt than with any of the other artists. Louise devotes multiple extended anecdotes to them, and William did most of her illustrations. The brothers likely knew the Piatts before Paris, though Piatt’s diaries don’t mention them. It’s hard to imagine anyone interested in art, as Donn Piatt clearly was, and who worked in Cincinnati and Columbus as a lawyer, journalist, and politician, who would not have known about the Walcutts. David spent more time than his brother in Cincinnati and Columbus, but William was active there, too. David Broderick seemed especially close to Ella, Louise’s younger sister. He painted a portrait of her in Paris, and Ella’s Paris sketchbook has multiple pictures by David (and one by William), including one of her lounging on some rocks.18 Possibly Walcutt’s picture of Simon Kenton owed to the Piatts, too (see fig. 26). The Piatt home looked out on the spot where he had his death-­ride. In any case, when Louise Piatt’s letters were compiled into an 1854 book by J. C. Derby, a firm with Ohio connections and Democratic sympathies, William Walcutt illustrated what were called her gossiping, mirth-­provoking accounts of French society.19 Neither Louise’s letters nor Walcutt’s illustrations embraced French culture. In what might be an allegory of the dangers of entering too deeply into French life, in one chapter of the book Louise describes Walcutt winning a French art prize, the reward of which is entry into the Catacombs. When he stops to sketch its cavernous interior (it reminds him of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave), he becomes lost, nearly dying. In another chapter, Louise describes Donn as the typically skeptical American (he was, however, at times a vegetarian and a spiritualist), quizzing David about the supposed merits of the Old Masters in the Louvre. She characterizes David, the artist, as ardently defending Titian’s Entombment and other Renaissance masterpieces, much as the men in Rossiter’s studio do. But perhaps tellingly, on the question of whether the men around Christ’s tomb could do a dead lift of the martyr (as Titian seems to suggest), David argued for the physical actuality of the scene rather than for artistic license, a defense that casts European art as realist (and so worth emulating) rather than poetic. Louise was more willing than her husband to value European artistic tradition—she admired the Spanish painter Murillo for giving the Virgin Mary ordinary human, maternal character—but she thought that Healy’s and academic advice to study from the great masters was wrong. American artists should not study in Europe until

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their style had been formed at home.20 The goal was to preserve American nature—that is, a kind of American realism consonant with a distinctive national art. William, if not David, did study with Adolphe Yvon, a professor at the Beaux-­Arts Academy. Though Yvon would become known as a specialist in Second Empire battle pictures, with close ties to the imperial government, his 1858 Genius of America spells out a clear Young America message of republican democracy, in a mix of personifications, symbols, and modern types (fig. 58).21 The Republic, with its Southern and Northern states in “pluribus unum,” marches directly forward, extinguishing war. These sternly classical female allegories are led by the lion, eagle, and trumpeting, flag-­waving angels of victory. George Washington hovers above a scene of white men who free slaves to read the Bible (and who cast Native Americans into darkness), while on the other half of the canvas, white European artisan emigrants step off boats, with oxen, shovels, and wives, ready to become yeomen pioneers. Commissioned by Episcopalian Irish Democrat retail magnate A. T. Stewart, for his Fifth Avenue mansion in New York—a mansion that replaced Samuel P. Townsend’s even more eclectic one—it is not unlike Lockwood’s allegories, even to the founding fathers seemingly rising to a Last Judgment. One must assume that studying with Yvon reinforced the belief that neoclassicism—a

Figure 58. Adolphe Yvon, The Genius of America, 1858, oil on canvas, 35 3/4 × 59 inches, St. Louis Art Museum, gift of Mrs. E. P. Hilts in memory of Mr. and Mrs. M. Rumsey. Public domain; image provided by St. Louis Art Museum.

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form of idealization Walcutt already employed for some of his illustrations— was the style of the heroic but required eclectic realism to be visibly modern.22 This seems far from Millet’s spontaneity, his giving the prostrate and beaten man power, but not so far from the idealized workers on the mastheads of America’s Own (see fig. 14). Walcutt’s illustrations, done in Paris, reflect Louise’s humorously critical stories of life in Paris with their own comic realism. His initial for her introduction to the city evokes not her first sight of the place (“clear sunlight bathing the roofs of a vast city, above which towered the Arch of Triumph”), but her facetious attitude: “The French will never be free, or capable of self-­ government, until they suppress soups.” The Piatts may have disapproved of the influence of the newly moneyed class in Washington, but the theme of the caste-­based French class system ruining that nation’s morals and manners was a constant in her book: “French business is a sham; French religion is a sham; French people are shams, vibrating between barricades and despotism.” Walcutt’s illustration of Paris accordingly places Emperor Louis Napoleon’s ancestor—atop the Vendôme column—uppermost on the page, taller than the church steeple; tyranny controls the city (fig. 59). He notes what she calls

Figure 59. William Walcutt, “Initial A,” Louise Piatt, Bell Smith Abroad (New York: J. C. Derby, 1854), 47. Public domain; image provided by author.

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the queer people and queerer vehicles on the streets, but behind them there are the “glittering soldiery” and the police, who in another initial stand above an entrapping spiderweb. For the Piatts, the ubiquity of police surveillance (one acquaintance tells them even his love letters are on file with the police) and police intervention in crowds are shocking.23 Walcutt’s point of view in the other illustrations for the book suggests that his own discomfort with aspects of French culture lay along similar class and political lines as the Piatts. The martyr Marat, famed for his defense of the proletariat, is youthful, clear-­eyed, and fervent, where Louis Napoleon is old, knowing, and shrewd.24 In his sketchbook, his line gets more congested and scribbly for people at whom he is directing a less than admiring gaze, as in a young Frenchman observed looking pruriently at a bathing woman. The same sort of man, with similarly bristling lines, represents an unctuous shopkeeper in Bell Smith (fig. 60). His many sketches of architecture, including “the Protestant church outside of the walls of Paris,” are by contrast neat and crisp and clean. Walcutt’s Turkey Shooting, begun in Paris, had some of this comic exaggeration typical of Young America’s portrayal of ordinary people, too (see fig. 29). But what would become his best-­known historical picture of the revolutionary generation, even though it featured ordinary Americans

Figure 60. Left: William Walcutt, illustration, Bell Smith Abroad (New York: J. C. Derby, 1854), 108. Right: William Walcutt, “Young Frenchman,” French sketchbook, 1852–54, n.p., Walcutt Papers, Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Public domain; images provided by author.

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destroying a neoclassical sculpture of a king, followed the cleaner lines of Yvon’s neoclassical heroism. Walcutt’s Demolishing of the Statue of King George III at Bowling Green, like his Turkey Shooting, was started in France (fig. 61). He brought a not entirely finished Pulling Down of the Statue of King George III, as a reporter from the Evening Mirror titled it (its title varied regularly), plus fifty-­odd other pictures back with him in 1854, including what one art journal called a “wild episode” in his American Mazeppa. The Evening Mirror described Pulling Down, and one of General Washington departing from New York at the close of the Revolution, en route to resigning his commission, as nearly complete, and praised both for their historical fidelity. Perhaps like Turkey Shooting, the Tearing Down of the Statue was one of the commissions for historical pictures that helped pay for his European travel. In any event, in 1857, what was presumably a second version of the painting was in art dealer William Schaus’s collection (fig. 62). Schaus had formerly been an agent for Goupil, but he left to open his own gallery and deal in prints himself. Schaus published several of Matteson’s paintings and copyrighted Millet’s American Mazeppa, and he may have bought a version of Walcutt’s Demolishing the

Figure 61. William Walcutt, Toppling the Statue of George III in the Bowling Green, New York, 1854, oil on canvas, 37 × 25 inches. Private collection. Public domain; image provided by Freeman’s Auction.

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Figure 62. William Walcutt, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III at Bowling Green, July 9, 1776, 1857, oil on canvas, 51 5/8 × 77 5/8 inches, Lafayette College Art Collection. Public ­domain; image provided by Lafayette College.

Statue intending to make a print of it. If so, he doesn’t seem to have realized his plan, perhaps because he auctioned his collection of American, French, and German art that year before a trip to Europe. The Express said that Walcutt’s picture of the Overthrow of the Statue of King George III—Schaus’s auctioneer exhibited the painting with the rest of his collection—attracted the most attention of any of the pictures as a stirring local incident painted with eminent merit.25 That the two biggest nativist dailies in the city concurred on the merits of Walcutt’s pictures of patriotic action during the Revolution raises the question of in what ways he was faithful to their idea of American origins. It’s usually suggested that Walcutt got the idea for his picture of New Yorkers destroying a sculpture of the British king from German artist Johannes Oertel’s depiction of the same scene (fig. 63). Walcutt likely knew the deeply religious Oertel in New York, and possibly saw his design before Walcutt left for Europe in the summer of 1852.26 Most interpretations of Oertel’s painting stress that the artist was equating the struggles of the 1848 revolutions—Young Germany in particular, but also Kossuth and Hungary, and the other

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Figure 63. Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, New York City, 1852–53, oil on canvas, 32 × 41 1/4 inches. Gift of Samuel V. Hoffman, New-York ­Historical Society. Public domain; image provided by Wikimedia Commons.

European liberation movements—to the American struggle for independence against a European crown. Walcutt, of course, shared those sympathies, as did antislavery advocates, Protestant evangelicals, and anticlerical Young America authors. The Day Book, a newspaper hostile to all these camps and one that considered Kossuth and his kindred a humbug, argued that it was wrong to compare the attempts of the ignorant masses in Europe to overthrow their rulers to the revolutionary struggles of our forefathers. The European mobs (lacking great generals like Washington) were failures, carrying out murderous atrocities rather than political action.27 Probably just such a liberatory comparison of the two revolutions was what Oertel had in mind. He dressed King George not in the neoclassical toga of the original New York statue, but in the more recognizable robes of a European monarch. On either side of the mounted monarch are the several groups that make up the future American citizenry: an American Indian family in the shadows, with headdress and peace medal (medals given tribal leaders by the federal government), exiting the stage, are contrasted with well-­dressed,

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golden-­haired white women and children, looking anxious. One working-­ class woman more actively raises her fist, but she is kneeling. A set of elegant, calm, and respectably wigged colonists is contrasted with a tumbling, rowdy group of men, who include an African American. They are in front of the shadowy background action, where a crowd of men is doing the actual work of pulling down the statue. Finally, a revolutionary artisan with a torch (that rhymes with what seems to be a fire or a fiery sunset on the horizon), a symbol of enlightenment, is shown looking away from the statue, arguing with an aristocratic Loyalist. As art historian Wendy Bellion observes, despite this liberal inclusion of various American types (ethnic, class, gender) and political viewpoints, Oertel’s king is not actually pulled off his pedestal. The stable and apparently ineffectual composition—with abandoned ladders prominent and the king still on his horse—does not celebrate American victory over the British crown so much as a comparison to the defeats of 1848 and Louis Napoleon’s ascent to the throne in 1852.28 Like the American Indian family, the viewer watches the event from a cultural as well as temporal distance. But if one follows the Day Book’s understanding of different national characters, then Oertel’s display of tolerance of diverse opinions, of peaceable reasoned arguments rather than the humiliation of aristocrats, were signs of the distinctive nature of the American Revolution, the sober mindset of the English/Teutonic tradition, versus the bloodthirsty mobs of Europe. Such an argument for Anglo-­ Saxon distinctiveness implicitly (or explicitly, for the Day Book) casts the unsuccessful rebellious populations of France and Italy as ignorant and uncontrolled, with their faith in the Catholic Church or the pope’s divine authority part of their ignorance. People who lost self-­control, who could not manage self-­government once they had deposed their tyrants, also demonstrated their unfitness to become American citizens. As already noted, Walcutt and his friends shared Oertel’s admiration for the Protestant hero Kossuth, that symbol of democratic revolution, as they shared his dislike for the return to power of men like Emperor Louis Napoleon. But Walcutt in his painting sacrifices Oertel’s calmness and inclusivity for a more powerfully unified and cross-­class democratic action, with accordingly a greater sense of brotherhood, though he too relegates actual violence to the middle ground. Art historian Ross Barrett rightly observes that most critics in this period demanded order and harmony in the fine arts, making images like Oertel’s or Walcutt’s of political violence, of riots or mobs, quite rare. The American Revolution, which legitimized and even heroized violence against a government that trampled on its citizens’ liberties, was a potential exception to the demand that repose be the dominant mood. Yet

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when John McRae engraved Oertel’s picture in 1859, he too strengthened the revolutionary forces—that is, working-­class white men—by replacing the Indian family with more white “citizens” and better subordinating the women. Walcutt contemplated another scene of popular action in a painting showing the Sons of Liberty erecting a liberty pole at Bowling Green (the same location as the statue of King George III), a motif that would have further emphasized white brotherhood, now acting to raise a symbol rather than destroy one. Its nativist sentiments would have been even clearer: Walcutt described the pole as carrying a flag with the inscription “George Rex and the liberties of America. No Popery.” Frederick Chapman in collaboration with McRae would do just that subject in 1875.29 Where Oertel’s painting had American Indians exiting a stage set to showcase the future members of the nation-­state as they responded to George Washington’s reading of the Declaration of Independence to the city, Walcutt removes them entirely as a founding or formative element. Perhaps he shared Donn Piatt’s ideas about the frontier west more than that of the Eastern nativists. But Walcutt kept African Americans central. Instead of Oertel’s man fallen at the foot of the statue, Walcutt places a younger man in shirtsleeves with cheering boys in the foreground and, in the later version, adds a Black woman, who is equally supportive. Walcutt was interested generally in the role of Black men in the revolution. In his research for a painting about General Baron von Steuben, he notes that the Rhode Island regiments under von Steuben included several companies of Black troops, whose bravery and discipline were unsurpassed throughout the war. His vision for a narrative picture of their participation nevertheless focused on von Steuben, their “brother soldier,” as a benefactor, giving the men money to travel home. Walcutt’s research notes for the Demolishing of George III’s Statue—he also relied on his grandfather’s recollections, which he had published in the Republic—cite an eyewitness who claims there were no “deacent people” present, just shouting boys. The same eyewitness identifies as the ringleader of the iconoclasts a “negro,” stripped to his trousers, and straining with all his might on a rope fastened around his waist, who is the one actually pulling off the head of the statue.30 A German engraving of 1776 lends credence to this account: it depicts well-­dressed all-­male colonists watching from a distance as a group of dark-­skinned men (some in turbans and loincloths, almost all bare-­chested) pull the ropes that bring the statue down, while white artisans in the background bring more tools.31 The idea of a united Black and white working class, in which African Americans took the lead, did not survive in Walcutt’s composition. The active force of the powerful Black revolutionaries, descriptions of whom were

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carefully copied in Walcutt’s handwriting, are displaced onto white artisans or into the background. The men actually hauling down the statue are moved to the back, and in the foreground a unified group of white onlookers, both older and younger men, raise arms and hats. The most powerful of them is a man in a wig, that mark of the upper class, who has taken off his jacket and with rolled-­up sleeves lunges forward with a hammer, a mechanic’s symbol.32 The idea of the Black man with the rope around his waist only survives in the strangely long, sinuous tails of his and two other white men’s wigs, as if transferring the actual actor’s fervor to them. The mob of united working-­and upper-­class white men themselves represent and act to establish the republic, not, despite their vandalism, to tear it down.33 Their violence rationalizes disloyalty to British law and hierarchies as stemming from the new, more democratic values and liberties of the republic. In the second version of the painting, Walcutt added Washington’s troops to the background, underscoring this. Showing a Black man not toppled by the revolution (as Oertel did), but as a participant, albeit an infantilized (boyish, short) one, whose pose parallels that of the white youth next to him, was a more equivocal move in this context. In 1854 and 1857, the dates of the two versions he did of the scene, Walcutt was painting not only at the height of Know-­Nothing political power, but also amid the powerful reaction against the Kansas-­Nebraska bill. This much despised act and its reliance on popular sovereignty threatened to bring slavery into the same western territories that Young America had promised as homesteads to white citizens. To the Unionist papers that praised Walcutt’s historical accuracy, the participation of a Black man (even in this marginalized manner) might have implied loyalty to the Constitution’s creation of a slave-­holding republic; to Northern antislavery Know-­Nothings, it might indicate Black men’s shared rights as native-­born, if subordinate, citizens. If including a Black man and woman emphasized the egalitarian, native nature of the people of the future republic, the presence of women, especially aristocratically dressed ones, helped emphasize that this crowd is no rabble— despite Walcutt’s addition of barking dogs in the second version. The beribboned women’s enthusiasm for revolution seems counterbalanced by their movement away from the fray. A white laundress, in red, white, and blue, clings to a shouting white fellow in the foreground; if the men are unified in their support, white women, who aren’t citizens in the same way, are patriots, too, but are permitted feminine fears. Next to her, in the second version of the painting, Walcutt adds a well, metonymically connected to her work, which like the presence of women generally, implies that the crowd is sober, rather than filled with drunken rogues. Women in familiar gender roles anchor

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the dangerous energies of the unified working class acting to overturn the existing order in familial and natural bonds that come with reassuringly conservative hierarchies. Yet Walcutt and other Sketch Club artists sometimes showed women more independently. Walcutt had as early as 1845 featured women as central actors in his revolutionary-­era paintings. At the Ohio Mechanics Institute in Cincinnati, he had exhibited Molly Pitcher at the Battle of Monmouth, with the heroine in full action, swabbing the gun, her arm and pole an extension of the cannon, surrounded by men shooting in the midst of battle (fig. 64).34 He showed either the same painting or a second version in 1849 at the National Academy in New York. The Herald praised it as one of the best historical pictures ever seen in the hall, because the spectator enters into the struggle, thanks to the uncommon reality in the faces and actions.35 Molly’s anatomy may be simplified, but her concentration and energy—and the contrast with the shirtless men around her—give the scene fire. The central wheel with its human extensions suggests an implacable forward force, that even the sacrifice of a fellow soldier does not impede.

Figure 64. William Walcutt, Molly Pitcher at the Battle of Monmouth, 1845/49, oil on canvas, 48 1/4 × 60 1/4 inches, private collection. Public domain; image provided by author.

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Its touch of melodrama, or its success, seems to have inspired Jacob Dallas to do his own closely related version, titled Molly Pitcher, the Heroine of Monmouth, avenging her husband’s death (fig. 65, left). Angled toward us more than in Walcutt, Molly thrusts the rod into the cannon’s mouth; her mien, which resembles a tight-­lipped Washington, is equally manly. The publishers of the $2 lithograph had Presbyterian poet and lawyer William Ross Wallace write a poem to the picture, “Captain Molly Pitcher,” which undoubtedly only heightened its “spirited” character. Wallace was like Fosdick a western poet with a foot in two camps: he vigorously supported international revolution, as well as orated on behalf of the nativists on July 4th holidays. He also edited the paper Two Worlds (American and European) with trade union leader and printer Keyes Arthur Bailey, pointing to the way both nativism and Young America drew on a working-­class fraternal ethos. Wallace, then, sympathetic to the ordinary man, points out that Molly sheds no tear

Figure 65. Left: Currier & Ives, The Women of ’76: Molly Pitcher, The Heroine of Monmouth, before 1872, lithograph, 13.4 × 9 inches, gift of Mrs. J. Amory Haskell, Monmouth County ­Historical Association. Copyrighted and engraved by J. D. Dayton & Co., 1850, after a sketch by Jacob Dallas. Public domain; image provided by Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Right: John McRae after Tompkins H. Matteson, “Elizabeth Zane,” American Odd-­ Fellows’ Museum (New York: Edward Walker, 1856), after 464. Public domain; image ­provided by author.

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over her fallen artisan husband, sprawled at her feet like the spilled water bucket, but with “firm resolve-­she fills his fatal post.”36 Her love for him, like those of men for their brothers-in-arms, gives her the strength to take on his foe in his place. Dallas’s style, and Walcutt’s, too, suggests that of the popular theater, which one art historian has called a hotbed of Democratic nativism. George Washington specialist Junius Brutus Stearns, who first made his appearance in 1846 with an even more highly charged painting of a heroic Massachusetts woman killing the Indians who had killed her child, was a scene painter for the theater, as well as a chaplain in the state militia. Sketch Club members included other scene painters, and Dallas and Walcutt depicted several actresses. But the style also strongly resembled Odd Fellows’ illustrations, with their interest in young women whose strenuous activities often reveal powerful, idealized bodies. Estelle’s poem to the heroine Elizabeth Zane, who faced bullets to spare her brother soldiers, was visualized by Matteson like a Molly Pitcher, with his heroine firmly grasping a phallic symbol in front of a fort—a man’s hand is just visible, pressing through a dark opening next to her (fig. 65, right). The same volumes that published the feats of Elizabeth Zane and Joel Wetsel illustrated the culmination of sentimental manhood in wedding poems like J. C. Hagen’s “Happiest Day of My Life,” with its accompanying engraving (fig. 66, bottom).37 The illustrator may have had in mind Stearns’s stately Marriage of Washington, engraved for the Odd-­Fellows’ Offering in 1851 with a commentary by C. E. Lester, as the model for his basic composition (fig. 66, top). But though Hagen’s poem stresses heaven’s blessing on the couple as the origin for their many happy days, the illustration, compared to Stearns, who did several religiously themed pictures of Washington, considerably diminishes the role of the church and minister. Instead, the groom dominates the outdoor setting, with its implication that divine nature and its accompanying sexual feeling, not religious or social protocol, has brought the couple together. Rather than Stearns’s emphasis on reverence and obedience associated with the bride’s feminine power and the church, the stress in this union is on contracts and natural rights.38 In Demolishing the Statue, too, the women, even with the additional furbelows on their dresses of Walcutt’s 1857 version, share in the gleefulness of the destruction. Decent (upper-­class) people, men and women, in Walcutt are revolutionary actors, perhaps in part thanks again to the recollections of his grandfather, who had been at the battle of Monmouth, and his father, who in the next war had escorted Dolley Madison from the burning White House. In Walcutt’s planned sequel to Pulling Down the Statue, a picture of

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Figure 66. Top: V. Balch after Junius Brutus Stearns, “Marriage of Washington,” Odd-Fellows Offering for 1851 (New York: Edward Walker, 1850), frontispiece. Public domain; image ­provided by author. Stearns’ painting, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, was done in 1849. Bottom: Illustration of John C. Hagen, “The Happiest Day of My Life,” Odd-Fellows’ Offering for 1853 (New York: Edward Walker, 1852), between pages 154 and 155. Public ­domain; image provided by author.

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Connecticut governor Oliver Wolcott (a distant relative) melting down the lead statue of the king for bullets for the war, the ladies of the town of ­Litchfield and Wolcott’s family were featured in his research. So too in Odd Fellows collections, “Freedom’s Holy Cause” was followed by “A Story of Woman’s Influence.”39 The benevolent orders, in their construction of cross-­ class white male unity, did not support equal rights for women, and neither did the Know-­Nothings. Perhaps neither did Walcutt’s Sketch Club, though the educational status of women members and attendees of that group may have pointed toward more equality. But all these organizations stressed their respect for women, especially wives; protecting widows financially was one of the key benefits of the fraternal orders, of course, but the glorification of spouses also emphasized that each member of the brethren—brotherhood as an egalitarian state that had revolutionary potential—was also anchored in the natural gender hierarchy and so conservatism of the family. When Goupil turned Stearns’s Marriage of Washington into a lithograph in 1853, it was retitled The Life of George Washington, The Citizen. It may well have been George Washington, or rather the debate over a New York monument to him, that stimulated interest in the Revolution’s destruction of the neoclassical equestrian statue of his predecessor. The subject of the Bowling Green statue had turned up in the cheap weekly Sunday Times and Messenger before Oertel or Walcutt tackled it, likely stimulated by the more radical Sun’s efforts to erect a monument to George Washington on the nearby Battery. The Sunday Times and Messenger had been founded by the conservative Democrat M. M. Noah, a former editor at the Sun (he was replaced by C. D. Stuart), and a contributor to the Odd Fellows on Jewish (so divine) law. Thomas R. Whitney of the Republic had been an editor at the Sunday Times before it merged with Noah’s Weekly Messenger, and Noah was featured in the pages of the Republic. Walcutt likely knew about Noah’s paper, since it regularly reported on the Sketch Club and its members, and club member Mary Kyle Dallas wrote for it. In 1851, the Sunday Times featured Henry A. Buckingham’s account of the toppling of the statue as part of its “Tales and Traditions” of New York, a series not unlike Walcutt’s ancestral recollections of past wars in the Republic or Lossing’s “Grandfather Knickerbocker” for the Odd Fellows—the latter a story that featured the innovation-­hating Dutchman’s dismay over the Sons of Liberty pulling down the gilded statue of the king.40 Buckingham describes the iconoclasm as originating in a conflict between Connecticut (New ­England) soldiers and Tory (New York) loyalists. It becomes a barroom brawl, a personal insult between drinking men, rather than a powerful national origin story.

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Why the reluctance to celebrate the king’s overthrow? The Sunday Times was Democratic, and it published authors like Irish nationalist John Savage and feminist Jennie June (J. C. Croly). It approved of America’s population mixing, except for Black and red and white—basically, only the mixing of European ethnicities was acceptable. Like other conservative papers, its Unionist, pro-­Compromise feeling brought it at times close to some nativist positions. Its freelancers included George Morris and T. B. Thorpe, and it did not object to the Order of United Americans’ domination of Washington’s birthday celebrations (including a banner based on a Trumbull painting). It even endorsed conservative Whig politicians like Fillmore and James Brooks of the Express, both of whom had ties to the Know-­Nothings. But it never wholeheartedly joined the movement, at least in part because its awareness of anti-­Semitism meant that it retained a skeptical attitude generally toward Protestant reformers and European freedom movements.41 Its embrace of the toppling of the statue as a national symbol, as in Buckingham’s story, was accordingly muted—at best, it was a symbol of the colonies still struggling to act in unison, or at worst, of a rowdiness that was suspicious in acting outside the law. Conservatives, then, like the Sunday Times, might favor Walcutt’s and McRae’s whitening of the founding citizens of the Republic, but the iconoclasm, the idea of the people as superior to or outside the law, was less acceptable. This was not only because of any implicit comparisons with European populations, but because of the dispute that had dominated national politics since California applied to enter the U.S. as a free state. Though the Compromise of 1850 had temporarily and unsatisfactorily paused the quarrel, the appearance of Walcutt’s paintings bracketed its renewal in the debate over whether slavery should be allowed in the Nebraska territory. In that context, they were statements of popular sovereignty. They lodged the power to determine liberties of citizens (like the vote), not in the law (which is being toppled) or the constitution (which was still to come), or even George Washington (who is absent, as are his generals), but in the character of the people, civilian and military, revealed by their actions. The second version even adds the motif of the king pointing to heaven, suggesting his divine authority is being brought down—transferred—to the people.42 This brand of thinking is evident in Walcutt’s other work, too. His Death-­Ride of Simon Kenton featured a hero who negated such traditional equestrian statues, which mounted their heroes above nature and in control of it. The American nobleman, his fate bound to his horse, was a myth of the people, a figure allied with their rush to either freedom or destruction. Walcutt’s picture of 1776 also shows men and women of the upper and lower classes, Black and white, as superior to or

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outside the law—wild, in that sense, or free. They act on no authority but their own innate, native-­born desire for independence. Walcutt’s creation of a unified people thus pointed toward the higher law (above the Constitution) of antislavery Republicans, but it also depicted the true Americanism that nativists envisioned. Such citizenship was not the result of allegiance to the law, but the product of a shared and native culture.

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Walcutt’s study of artisans toppling gilded equestrian statues of monarchs informed his own design of a public monument for a hero of the War of 1812, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, which would replace a fountain in Cleveland’s public square. Walcutt had returned from France in 1854 not only with paintings, but with nearly 100 sculptures.1 Winning a French Academy Imperial award for his life modeling must have confirmed for him that his sculptural ambitions had merit, despite the failure of his earlier proposals for the Tindale monument and for a George Washington monument in New York. That latter effort, which perhaps taught Walcutt the value of avoiding narrative in public art, had been mixed up with Know-­Nothing politics, and may even have been what introduced Walcutt to editors like Whitney. Members of Whitney’s Order of United Americans had infiltrated the Washington Monument Association, which was charged with raising funds from subscribers for erecting a sculpture in New York. When the commission opened a competition in 1848 for designs, Order of United Americans member and architect Minard Lafever won with an Egyptian obelisk (his design proposal was engraved by Nathaniel Orr).2 Lafever’s monument was never built, thanks partly to the intervention of a group of wealthy patrons—both Whig and Democrat, as both parties were concerned with distancing themselves from the Know-­Nothings. Rather than risking a competition, they commissioned Henry Kirke Brown and Horatio Greenough to produce a bronze equestrian statue that was installed in Union Square in 1856. But back in 1848, Walcutt’s proposal for the competition had its backers among the usual working class, Democratic, and Protestant reform papers (fig. 67). The Sunday Dispatch praised his plan, illustrated by Dispatch 135

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Figure 67. William N. Dunnel, The Engraving of the Washington Monument after Walcutt’s Design (New York: Wm. S. Dorr, 1848), cover and pages 4 and 6. Public domain; images provided by author.

engraver William Dunnel, as a monument not only of Washington, but of the Nation and the Age. In that same issue, the newspaper featured an engraving of the classical temple serving as the new Odd Fellows Hall in New York, where the competing designs were exhibited. C. D. Stuart, at the Sun, thought the Washington Monument Association favored Walcutt’s original

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and unique proposal, and Greeley’s Tribune reprinted the Sun’s recommendation of Walcutt’s sculptural narrative, which followed Washington’s rise from the wilderness to an apotheosis. The Evening Mirror, always more conservative than the Sun, dismissed Walcutt’s Young America (onward!) scheme as impractical, and instead endorsed Lafever and the equally impractical design of William Ross Wallace (see fig. 73).3 What the Sun and the Dispatch meant in calling Walcutt’s design “of the Age,” was that, like Tupper, it emphasized rational Progress—of the man, of the nation, of the century. Lafever’s and Wallace’s designs were towering, but static, while Walcutt’s offered an ascent. Walcutt’s design was a kind of historical painting in stone, an effort to include time, to recapitulate historical events as the viewer climbed up the sculpted tower. Walcutt had innumerable ideas for Washington paintings, some of which—in the Alleghenies, and resigning his commission—were realized. His program for the paintings tracked Washington’s military achievements (with Lafayette after Monmouth; at Princeton, Valley Forge, or escaping with his army; his trials and tribulations, or just praying in the woods). He had a particular interest in Washington and the west (with Native Americans; on a raft; in Cherry Valley), and New York (preparatory to resigning his commission; en route to the capital to take up the presidency). Unlike Burns, Lockwood, and Yvon, or even Brueckner and Stearns, it was not the deified Washington so much as the historical actor who interested him. He didn’t consult hagiographic biographies like Headley’s for information but tried to find primary sources in the publications of the American Philosophical Society, in the General Orders of Washington, in Watkins’ Annals of New York, Sir Henry Clinton’s Reflections upon the Revolution, and Evert Duyckinck’s Cyclopedia of American Literature (Duyckinck was a long-­time editorial partner of Cornelius Mathews). The historical evolution of man, nation, and flag—Walcutt carefully disentangled Washington’s private arms from the stars and stripes on the flag—was important to him. It was the method of George Bancroft, the “historian for the people,” who had proven the progress of freedom-­loving, Anglo-­American, and Christian principle in his history of the U.S. and who foresaw its eventual conquest of the world.4 Neoclassical architectural orders rather than Gothic ornament or Egyptian unity provided the visual buttressing to Walcutt’s narrative of this conquest. Neoclassicism was the style most associated with Washington—American Artists Association officer James Burns in 1849 was still putting Washington into a toga for his apotheosis. But Walcutt was generally not interested in the Gothic, despite its strong Christian—perhaps worryingly Catholic, and so feudal—associations.5 His act of painting the patriotic, militant American action at Bowling Green against the king, in a style that had the clarity of

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classical outline, in a sense displaced the actual Gothic fountain that occupied the square (fig. 68). That fountain, designed by James Renwick, best known for his Gothic Smithsonian (Holden’s called that building repre­ hensible and disgraceful), was a favorite subject for scorn among cultural nationalists. W. W., in a July 4th letter to the Mirror in 1844, ridiculed the “rustic” fountain as a heap of rocks, a hideosity that perhaps was a fit occupant of a place formerly burdened with a statue of a scrofulous king, but that nevertheless was a naked deformity that didn’t suggest a thought other than wonder at its rudeness. The writer wished for a chaste (neoclassical) marble design commemorating historical incidents to replace it.6 Renwick’s strength as a designer was understood to be his ability to compose the picturesque, but the rock fountain seemed to Democratic observers a caricature of this rustic quality. Democratic politician Mike Walsh, a friend to land reform, called the fountain a libel on works of Nature, designed by someone who had only seen potato gardens and duck ponds.7 Oddly, the Gothic was too democratic—it erased the heroic character of Nature, artisans, and the Revolution.

Figure 68. Nathaniel Currier, View of the Great Conflagration at New York July 19th, 1845, from the Bowling Green, ca. 1845, lithograph. New York: Published by N. Currier. Public ­domain; image provided by the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

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Walcutt connected each classical order in his proposed Washington monument to a stage in American history. From a Nomadic order, with nature peculiar to American soil (corn, tobacco, cotton), the native-­born Washington leads the country to independence (the manly Doric). The graceful Ionic indicated Washington’s retreat to domesticity at Mount Vernon, a stage representing the nation’s prosperity as it (North and South) develops manufacturing, agriculture, and commerce. The Corinthian temple of liberty at the top housed the immortal (in memory) Washington and was a popular motif in many of the proposals, invoking as it did Masonic symbolism and the U.S. Capitol.8 Frescoes inside Walcutt’s temple recapitulated the story in more detail, but they ended not with the divine George, but with America’s mechanical inventions, culminating in Morse’s telegraph. There was some irony in this. Morse had been bitter about being excluded from the commissions for the historical paintings in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, a location originally meant to house a godlike statue of the first president. The aristocratic Cornelius Mathews had in 1846 even somewhat unkindly suggested that Morse’s telegraph wires be placed there instead of his painting.9 But for Walcutt as for many artisans, the telegraph was a serious symbol of national unity and mechanical progress. For artisan-­oriented papers like the Tribune, Dispatch, and Sun, all of whom were committed to international democratic revolution, the emphasis on rapid movement and change, whether driven by great men or the great mechanical inventions of artisans, was a crucial element of the “age.”10 The overlap, or crossover with Know-­Nothing sentiments, lay in the idea of it also being a distinctly Anglo-­American Protestant progress—it was Protestantism and Britain that gave the world the concept of American liberty and its resulting inventions, a concept that George Washington (and to a much lesser extent the telegraph) emblematized. Nearly ten years later, thanks to his home state of Ohio, Walcutt would have his chance to put his progressive ideas into effect, albeit in a statue for a different war hero, Commodore Perry. This time, Walcutt’s ties to Democratic Young America helped him defeat his main rival for the statue, his friend T. D. Jones, who was backed by the antislavery Republicans. The momentum for a statue began at the forty-­fifth anniversary of the Battle of Lake Erie, the battle in which Perry in 1813 had famously and comprehensively defeated the British. Some 8,000 people visited Put-­in-­Bay Island, Perry’s headquarters in Ohio, for the anniversary celebration. Sandusky, the closest major town, promptly tried to capitalize on the tourism potential by forming a Monument Association. They hired Jones, who had returned to Cincinnati, to design it. He planned a 160-­foot limestone naval column with a capital formed of shells and ship prows, with a twelve-­foot pedestal or capstan on

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top, and then an eighteen-­foot statue of Perry atop that, a scheme (minus the naval emblems) not so different from the colossal proposals for the Washington monument in New York. A spiral staircase inside the column would let viewers ascend and have a view of the lake and the fruits of Perry’s victory. Support for the Put-­in-­Bay monument was mostly Republican. Sandusky architect J. B. Merrick, a Southern-­sympathizing Democrat, had his proposal of a 123-­foot-­high Egyptian obelisk shot down. Jones, by contrast, was backed by former Ohio governor Tom Corwin and current Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase. Chase, a Republican and friend of Donn Piatt, had won statewide office thanks to a fusion of nativists and antislavery Whigs. Jones had served the Republicans well by hawking his plaster busts of both Corwin and Chase throughout the state, and Chase would later recommend Jones’s portraits to Lincoln. The Sandusky Register, a proponent of both Jones and the monument, was edited by another very active member of the Republicans.11 The monument had enough momentum that its cornerstone was laid in 1859, with a copy of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible inside, and with the great Ohio abolitionist Joshua Giddings in attendance. A fundraising lithograph of the statue was issued, but the monument was never completed (a plain column was erected in 1912) because of Sandusky’s rivalry with Cleveland. Cleveland, which is also on Lake Erie, unveiled its monument to Perry in late 1860 (fig. 69). Like Sandusky, it was part of the Western Reserve, the region of Ohio settled mostly by New Englanders, and so it was a stronghold of Republican antislavery sentiment. But Cleveland early turned to manufacturing and industry and had more Irish immigrant voters than smaller cities in the region did. Its public square, where the Perry monument was located and where the Catholic cathedral would stand, was the destination for the city’s Fourth of July parades—after the tradition of ending the parades at a Protestant church was given up in the 1840s.12 The city had a significant Democratic base, and it supported Joseph Gray’s Plain Dealer, one of the country’s most influential papers. Its mission must have resonated with skilled artisans. It aimed, Gray wrote, to be independent of monied corporations and privileged orders generally. “The country is checkered with Corporations,” he warned, in language that might well have appealed to artisans struggling to compete with heavily capitalized manufacturers. “They own the Railroads and steam boats. They monopolize the carrying trade and will soon fix the price of produce and rule the rates of every department of trade. Corporations own and control our public men and our public newspapers and are, in fact, umpires of public opinion. Little by little do the people yield their rights and independence to them . . . our opposition is to the party which upholds the

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Figure 69. Left: Benson Lossing, “Perry’s Statue,” Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868), 540. Public domain; image provided by Cornell ­University. Right: “Public Square at Cleveland, Ohio, with the Perry Statue,” Harper’s Weekly, September 8, 1860, 568–69. Public domain; image provided by author.

system.”13 The Republican Party, the one that Democrats believed upheld that corporate system, with Lincoln at its head, would take nine of eleven wards in Cleveland in 1860. But to do so, it had to “fuse” Whig abolitionists, antislavery Know-­Nothings, antislavery German freethinkers, and Democratic free soilers. The Plain Dealer tried to point out the contradictions in this fusion, especially that German immigrants should side with the party of True Americans and Protestant blue laws banning Sunday drinking. But German radicals who saw Catholicism (or at least the pope’s influence) and slavery both as forms of despotism in some ways shared the views of native-­born evangelical Protestants.14 Americanus, a Know-­Nothing, thus wrote angrily to the Plain Dealer after one Republican election victory to argue that the German radicals should not be allowed to vote—only the native born, the grandsons of the men of 1776, those who don’t try to innovate away from founding American principles (presumably including slavery and religion) should be permitted the franchise. The participation of these German immigrants in the Republican Party in turn pushed some artisanal nativists toward the Democrats, as witnessed by Americanus’s letters to the Plain Dealer, where they had a troubled alliance with the Irish working class. Given Walcutt’s history of anti-­corporate activities, as in the battle with the American Art-­Union, and his Young America feeling, as in the anti-­despotism of the Sketch Club, he

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too might have found the Plain Dealer’s producerist ethos—featuring the firemen and trades unions—appealing.15 Certainly the Plain Dealer fully backed him. Harvey Rice, the Democratic city councilman and educator who chaired Cleveland’s Perry Monument committee, was a founder of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. But his being a Democrat did not forestall an editor at the rival Cleveland Leader from counting on Rice to ensure that the city’s Industrial School remained a Protestant institution.16 So too at the inauguration of the Perry statue: the Hibernian Guard marched with the other troops, but the officiating ministers were Protestant. The realignment of the parties in 1859 also helped create an elite consensus on the statue. The youthful Perry (only about twenty years old at the time of his naval victory) had long been a Whig hero, though a more controversial one than Washington. James Fenimore Cooper had published a partisan (to some) naval history in 1839, promoting a Democratic naval officer (Jesse Elliott), as being just as important to the victory in the Battle of Lake Erie as Perry. This idea had traction for Democrats, and even in 1858 a survivor of the Battle of Lake Erie wrote the Plain Dealer arguing that Elliott, or the wind, was as deserving of a statue as Perry.17 Walcutt’s statue would include a relief on the pedestal showing Perry crossing from his flagship to Elliott’s ship, perhaps an acknowledgment of the latter’s role. But by 1859, Perry had largely won the contest and had support from influential Democrats, especially August Belmont, who had married into the Perry family. Belmont, an art collector, New York banker (and converted Jew), would become a patron for a New York statue to Perry and visited Cleveland for Walcutt’s inauguration ceremony. As the Plain Dealer said to its Democratic readers in an effort to reconcile them to Perry, “All the historians can’t be wrong.” Perhaps as importantly, revisiting (and even reenacting) the War of 1812 in 1859 meant, like reviving the colonial era and the Revolution, rehearsing a relationship to England in terms of a common tradition of a free (and Anglo-­Saxon) people, as well as America’s independence from and progress beyond its parent. Walcutt had interviewed British marine veterans in Greenwich on his trip to London and published their stories in the Republic to the effect that the two nations’ ordinary men are kindred spirits. Perry’s slogan, emblazoned on Walcutt’s granite pedestal, “We have met the enemy and they are ours,” itself points to the closeness of the relationship. Democratic politician and historian George Bancroft, who spoke at the inauguration of the statue, emphasized that Perry’s “enemy” had been a nation that used the same language, cherished the same love of liberty, and enjoyed the freest form of government.18 This sentiment, in 1860, certainly alluded to fears of

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an impending civil war. It pleads for union by underscoring the common Anglo-­American Protestant origins of the two “sides,” then and in the past. Republican committee members and Cleveland newspapers accordingly came on board. The monument was supported by George A. Benedict’s Herald, a conservative Republican paper that the Plain Dealer called the voice of the nativists, and by the antislavery and anti-­Catholic Leader.19 The Piatts’ Ohio newspaper, the Mac-­A-­Cheek Press, gives a sense of how much Republicans had absorbed Protestant anti-­immigrant positions. It praised the Herald as the one of the best Republican journals in the state while itself publishing tributes to the “American Sabbath” that identified the custom of closing all businesses and movement on Sunday as a distinctive national custom in need of legal preservation from the violations of immigrants.20 Walcutt was a good compromise for these papers and their constituencies. Like the much more famous Hiram Powers, who probably turned down the relatively small fee offered for the statue, Walcutt could be called an Ohio sculptor; his embrace of progress suited both Young America Democrats and Protestant reformers; and given the monument’s subject, the publication in the Republic of “Recollections of His Father’s Experiences in the War of 1812” probably did not hurt, nor did his reputation as a European-­trained artist. That Artemus Ward quickly befriended and vigorously supported Walcutt after he was announced as the choice for the Perry monument offers some insight into how Walcutt navigated the complicated politics of the period. Ward—or as he was then known, Charles Farrar Brown (the “e” in “Browne” was added later)—was city editor for the Plain Dealer, writing a daily column of “City Facts and Fancies.” As a Douglas Democrat, a supporter of popular sovereignty as a method for determining whether slavery would be allowed in western states, like his paper, he put the Union above any sympathy for enslaved people. At the same time, the New Englander gave free African Americans—including their Young American Literary Club and the colored chapter of the Odd Fellows, both of which met in the Odd Fellows Hall— respectful coverage in his column. In a version of cultural nationalism’s embrace of distinctively American music rather than the classical tradition, Brown was a fan of blackface minstrels and suggested that Stephen Foster’s adaptations of minstrel music meant he would replace George P. Morris as America’s songster. Ward’s own comic persona was a Yankee showman, a practitioner of humbug who thereby exposed the absurdity of others. His various targets included abolitionists as well as speakers like Edward Everett, who made a career of glorifying George Washington. But once the South seceded, Ward supported Lincoln (in one story, literally embracing him). In

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that same rather admiring satire, he backhandedly compliments Lincoln by wishing that Walcutt’s or Powers’s sense of beauty would permit them to sculpt him.21 Walcutt moved to Cleveland in June of 1859, and Ward began praising him in his local column almost immediately, pointing to his earlier designs for the Washington monument as fitting him to commemorate the youthful naval hero.22 Like most editors, Ward had friends in the city, whom he regularly promoted, most of whom became involved with the Perry monument. Ward roomed with Jack Ryder, the official photographer for the inauguration of the Perry statue. Ward collaborated with the impresario Ossian E. Dodge, owner of a Cleveland music shop, who wrote the music for a Masonic choir to sing at the Perry inauguration (he also wrote the song for the cornerstone ceremony for Jones’s monument). Ward said of the music that “if Perry stands unmoved that day, he must be made of marble.” Perhaps the Cleveland lyricist for Dodge’s music, E. G. Knowlton, was related to Walcutt’s friend, the poet and Republic contributor J. M. Knowlton. Benjamin Lossing, who received an official invitation to attend the inauguration and illustrated Walcutt’s “chaste” (classical) statue in his Pictorial Field-­Book of the War of 1812, mentions Knowlton and Dodge in his description of the event.23 As with other Democrats in Walcutt’s circle, it was Ward’s anticlerical views, directed mostly at the Catholic Church, rather than hostility to immigrants per se, that occasionally aligned him with nativist views. Lossing’s illustration neatly aligns Perry not with the scattered people of Cleveland, and certainly not with the crowd of more than fifty thousand in the square for the inauguration, but with the 250-­foot steeple of the Presbyterian church behind the statue (fig. 69, left). Harper’s Weekly, in its double-­ page spread on the inauguration of the statue, did the same, though it showed more of an appreciative crowd (fig. 69, right). Ward (and Lossing) also approved of Bancroft, the inauguration’s principal orator, a Democratic historian whose land at Newport adjoined Belmont’s, calling him the first writer to exhibit not only the facts but the principles and ideas of American history. Indeed, one journal for that reason considered his writings unfit—too lacking in the ideal—for art.24 In order for Bancroft to develop his theme of the progress of the principle of popular power toward greater individual liberty in the republic, he assigned the root of slavery in the New World to the Catholic Spanish. But as Walcutt did, his admirers continued to include African Americans in their own genealogies of Union; Lossing identified the colored men who survived the Battle of Lake Erie and were in attendance at the inauguration.

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Walcutt’s Cleveland studio was on the grounds of the marble works of Thomas Jones, the contractor who would put Walcutt’s design into stone. The location was certainly artisanal, but it let him exhibit his pictures in a city that lacked art galleries. Ward praised his splendid painting there of Simon Kenton, lashed to the back of a wild horse and surrounded by painted and bloodthirsty Indians. Ward also described Walcutt’s rather neoclassical, academic procedure for creating the sculpture. He built up the clay around an iron skeleton of a nude man (anatomists testified to its accuracy), and then the artist added regimentals on top of the flesh. The result was Perry the Bold (the title of a Plain Dealer poem), young, alive with action and martial energy— even able to wink at pretty women. The statue has deteriorated because of the Parian marble’s exposure to weather and pollution, and the cover of William Dressler’s song for the inauguration probably provides the most detailed view of what Walcutt’s sculpture originally looked like (fig. 70). Ward called the engraving an “excellent facsimile.”25 The bold commodore’s clothes

Figure 70. William Dressler, “Perry’s Victory March” (Cleveland: S. Brainard, 1860). Public domain; image provided by author.

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seem to move with his pivot as he steps forward and points behind him. The frog on his shoulder parts, his jacket flaps, his trousers wrinkle; Walcutt effectively draws on contrapposto to give him spirit. And, appropriately for a republic-­minded monument, he is not alone. In Walcutt’s design, he is accompanied by common sailors who, though leaning and subordinate, replicate his pose. At the inauguration, which was filled with military display (Captain George Walcutt brought his military company from Columbus) and a reenactment of the battle on the lake, everyone—even the editors from Sandusky— agreed it was a triumph. Walcutt’s social, financial, and artistic success in Cleveland was such that he named one of his sons Cleveland. Upon arrival in the city, he promptly received commissions for portraits of wealthy men like Leonard Case (a banker and railroad investor) and the Butts family (hoteliers and hatters). He formed a Cleveland Sketch Club, but perhaps because of Cleveland’s underdeveloped art scene, it was a more exclusive and amateur group than in New York. It started out meeting in his studio and drew from Walcutt’s classes there—he had twenty-­t wo pupils taking instruction in drawing and sculpting. It quickly moved from this location among stonecutters to meeting in homes, and so maintained an air of domestic (it ended at eleven p.m.) social exclusivity. Women were quite prominent. Walcutt was the president, but Miss Cleveland was vice president, and the club met at the homes of several married and unmarried women. Many of the members resided on Euclid Street, later Euclid Avenue, also known as Millionaire’s Row. Honorary (literary) members were mostly editors, including Ward (and the Plain Dealer’s chief illustrator, George Hoyt), and an editor from the Leader. Ward described the “strict” rules for admission—must have social standing, morals &c, be a party of refinement and taste—though the Leader claimed submission of an original drawing was the only requirement. The club invited Presbyterian minister, Leader contributor, and antislavery activist James A. Thome to speak to them on the “arts of a future age.”26 When the Cleveland Review complained of the conservative air of the club (its publisher would go on to print a more pro-­Southern Democratic paper than even the Plain Dealer), Ward retorted that “when the Cleveland Sketch Club wishes for any ‘suggestions’ from outsiders, they will not call upon the ‘leetle coterie’ of the Review.” Walcutt’s study in France enhanced his credentials in Cleveland, but it also reinforced his distance from artisans. The Washington correspondent for the Plain Dealer, who knew Walcutt, mocked him for it a bit, suggesting it made Walcutt inferior to Clark Mills. Mills had sculpted the capital’s equestrian statues of Washington and Andrew Jackson, statues famous (or infamous) for their energetic, charging poses. Mills, who came to Cleveland

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for the Perry inauguration, was self-­taught, which his Democratic fans credited for his ingenious compositions. Conservatives preferred a more restrained style, and the correspondent probably was paying Walcutt a compliment by distinguishing him from Mills. Ward, too, underlined Walcutt’s distance as a sculptor from mechanics when he described the ceremony that transferred Walcutt’s model to John O’Brien, the practical sculptor, who would reproduce it in marble.27 The artist and the other gentlemen in attendance each gave the marble block purely symbolic blows with the hammer and chisel. Both Ward and Walcutt moved to New York after the inauguration. Ward became editor of Vanity Fair, replacing an editor who had been too antislavery for the publishers, and joining a group of bohemians that included Henry L. Stephens, an illustrator for Frank Leslie’s, which had covered the Perry monument inauguration in great detail.28 But Walcutt’s ties to nativism followed him back. John O’Brien, the “practical sculptor” who translated Walcutt’s plaster model into the actual marble, and his supporters sent complaints to Irish newspapers like the Boston Pilot and New York’s Phoenix about how credit for the statue had been wrongly awarded to Walcutt. O’Brien also wrote to papers that because of their Unionist, anti-­Republican politics may have seemed likely to be sympathetic, like the New York Herald and the Cosmopolitan Art Journal, the journal of the Sandusky-­based art union. PKW’s letter in the Catholic Pilot pointed out O’Brien’s credentials (he had studied in Europe, too) and his skill, then accused Walcutt and Cleveland’s promoters of the statue of deliberately excluding him. He argued that they named Walcutt “the Buckeye Artist” in order to set the Irishman, born in Cork, aside. O’Brien added that the Cleveland press—he cited the Leader, the most nativist of the dailies—had not supported him, because unlike Walcutt, he hadn’t given the editors medallion portraits of themselves.29 The Pilot and the papers that gave O’Brien and his Tennessee assistant, James J. Butler, a voice in the weeks leading up to Lincoln’s election were, like the Plain Dealer, Douglas Democrat papers interested in controversies that could be used to highlight the fusion of abolitionists and Know-­Nothings in the Republican Party. They were often also critical of England as Ireland’s oppressor and of rhetoric about the innate greatness of the Anglo-­Saxon (versus the Celtic). But O’Brien was not successful in raising an outcry. This was mostly because prestigious international sculptors like Hiram Powers were known to not chisel the actual marble themselves, hiring skilled workmen instead. But it helped that Walcutt had friends in some of the same camps as O’Brien. Vanity Fair suggested O’Brien go back to Italy, while the two major pictorial weeklies, Frank Leslie’s and Harper’s, despite their different politics, provided Walcutt and Perry with big promotional spreads. This was

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unsurprising as far as Frank Leslie’s goes, given that Sketch Club friends like Dallas worked there (Thomas B. Thorpe, who also worked at Leslie’s, presided at Dallas’s funeral) and given its general Young America and Democratic stance, but the staunchly Anglo-­A merican and Protestant Harper’s Weekly also gave the Perry statue an elaborate illustrated section. It was accompanied by the usual anti-­Catholic snippets and pervasive pro-­English coverage of the Prince of Wales’s visit to America, including one columnist’s musing on the fraternal relationship of the English and American nations.30 Though Walcutt continued to paint portraits, the Perry monument established his reputation as a sculptor. After the Civil War, he created at least three funeral monuments, at least one more portrait statue, a statuette of an actress, and an ideal sculpture of a female nude, Musadora. He designed an angel for the Walcutt family plot in Columbus and a classicized, allegorical woman carrying a lyre—suggesting spirituality and music—for his wife’s grave in New York.31 His cemetery monument for William Ide in Columbus, in which a similarly idealized woman holds an urn, evokes the grief-­stricken widow who commissioned it and her religious, reforming spirit (fig. 71, left). The wealthy Congregationalist and Republican Ides (Central Bank, where Ide was president, was located in the Columbus Odd Fellows’ building) had been involved with asylums in Columbus, from the Protestant orphan asylum to the Female Benevolent Society to the Institute for Feeble-­Minded Youth. Walcutt in 1846 had painted residents of the Blind, Deaf and Dumb, and Lunatic asylums, and later others involved with the asylum movement, notably Ohio Governor William Dennison and his wife. Mrs. Harriet Jewett Ide, an heiress in her own right and active as a home missionary in Columbus, Ohio, may have known the artist from her religious and reform connections; Walcutt painted a portrait of her, too. In these monuments, the dead person is missing. All that is left is the figure of religion, or the spirit, elevating the dead upward, much as in his Tindale monument or America’s Own mastheads, where allegorical women supplant (or raise) the working-­class subject (see figs.13, 14). In line with those of his fellow sculptors, Walcutt’s strongly idealized sculptures of real or imagined women were almost always meant to express this character of the spiritual, albeit without the imaginative energy permitted in his fairy illustrations. Even his sweet bust of one of his daughters, created when she died as a toddler in 1870, though it has more personality (and rounder cheeks) than his allegories, takes advantage of the associations of classicizing white marble to evoke a spiritual rather than material being (fig. 71, right). The nineteenth

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Figure 71. Left: William Walcutt, William Elmore Ide Monument, Green-lawn Cemetery, ­Columbus, Ohio, 1880. The marble was cut in Italy. Right: William Walcutt, Myrilla, 1870, marble, Collection of David Walcutt. Public domain; images provided by David Walcutt.

century’s culture of classicism, especially as embodied in marble women, evoked the soul as well as the enlightened consciousness.32 Perhaps his most ambitious venture in this genre is Musadora, taken from British poet James Thomson’s Seasons, a Sketch Club subject in 1854 (fig. 72). The nude Musidora was a popular subject for Victorian sculptors who like Walcutt were tied to a neoclassical vocabulary, because she was both erotic and “chaste.” She was a “daughter of Albion,” a symbol of England, as was her chivalric lover, who when he sees her bathing retreats to guard her privacy. It’s a story that expects the sons of Albion, too, to display modesty and respect for women. Walcutt presents the moment when she is exposed, but because she is unconscious of being seen, she is serene, and—compared to most versions—quite upright and unconcerned. One journal described it as

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Figure 72. William Walcutt, Musadora, 1868, marble, 64 1/4 × 17 × 17 inches, High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Public domain; image provided by Wmpearl and ­Wikimedia Commons.

possessing a thoughtful expression and graceful action.33 Nevertheless, in 1868, this mode of ideal nude was on the wane; artists were moving toward greater realism. Whether or not this affected his market, Walcutt’s day job in the customs house in New York and his family’s move to the suburbs of the aptly named Mount Vernon, New York, meant his artistic output before his death in 1882 diminished anyway.34

Conclusion Walcutt’s Revival

After the Civil War, with Know-­Nothing legislation officially repudiated by both the Republicans and the Democrats and without the stimulation of new immigrants, nativist sentiment diminished until, at the end of the century, a new and even bigger wave of immigrants (ten million a year at the peak) began to arrive from Southeastern Europe.1 They were once again associated not only with non-­Protestant religion but, like the freethinkers of 1848, with socialism. This led in turn to a reinvigorated political true Americanism among elites and labor organizers and to a Colonial Revival in art, design, and architecture that included Walcutt and his sculpture of Perry. Walcutt’s initial portrayal of the heroes of 1776 and 1812 might themselves be considered part of a mid-­ century Colonial Revival, though it differed in some respects from its more thoroughgoing manifestation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 The later revival recommended reproducing (in modified forms, to accommodate modern conveniences) the styles of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. Doing so signaled rejection of Victorian ornament and industry in favor of a simpler, more natural and rustic mode of life, while at the same time retaining that society’s characteristic aristocratic hierarchy. The earlier Colonial Revival had, as demonstrated by Walcutt’s pictures, focused less on reconstructing the styles of the past and more on “preserving” the memory of the generations credited for settling the country and fighting the British in two wars. Such historical reconstruction could be sectional, pitting Northern heroes against Southern feats, a unifying reminder of the states’ common origins, or, sometimes, a promotion of an Anglo-­British tradition of liberty as a defense against non-­Protestant immigrants and their 151

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political influence.3 The campaign to save George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, which began with a Ladies’ Association in the 1850s, is a famous example of this sentiment about preservation. When artists like Thomas Rossiter, Walcutt, or Kentuckian William Ross Wallace designed monuments to George Washington (Wallace dedicated his specifically to Mount Vernon), their goal was not to emulate the Georgian style of the first president’s mansion, but to elevate Washington as an example of American republicanism.4 Wallace in fact placed him 350 feet up atop a column, where he asserted American principles over a vast globe and trampled on crowns (fig. 73). The engraving and printing of his design was done by John Orr, a close friend of Wallace’s (Jack to his Bill), just as William Dunnel, who engraved Walcutt’s design for the same monument, was probably a friend; the world of engravers, illustrators, authors, and publishers was not an anonymous one. Though global principles are found in the very architecture of his monument, in his poems on the “True American Citizen” and speeches to nativist rallies, Wallace emphasized that republicanism sprang from native American principles. Citizens should follow Washington’s example, and the principle of popular (democratic) power might spread across the globe, but antebellum Know-­Nothings equally glorified Washington for his warning in his Farewell Address to be wary of foreign—which they interpreted to mean Catholic or papal—influence. For artists and writers like Wallace and Walcutt who stressed the literally towering importance of the colonial-­era generation, the emphasis was on preserving present-­day continuity with an Anglo-­American past, and that past was a Protestant one.5 The one professional architect in New York who at mid-­century adopted the styles of colonial architecture in the manner of the later revival did so for churches, for an Episcopal and a Dutch Reformed congregation in Manhattan and Kingston, respectively.6 And that architect was a member of Whitney’s Order of United Americans. The two Colonial Revivals thus both had a streak of nativism at their heart. Both flourishing amid the highest levels of immigration to the United States ever known, adopters declared their allegiance to and inheritance of Anglo-­ Saxon Protestant traditions, creating a hereditary or historical aristocracy for the country. During the later revival, thanks to Progressive reforms and trade union opposition to increasing the supply of cheap labor, Congress passed the National Origins Act of 1924, which assigned quotas for immigrants from various countries that were designed to maintain America’s white, Protestant, and European character.7 At both historical moments, reviving the past was understood as a way to Americanize new immigrants, indoctrinating them in principles of liberty that not coincidentally aligned with a Protestant, providential mission.

Conclusion

Figure 73. John W. Orr after William Ross Wallace, The Washington Memorial, 1860. ­P ublished by W. G. Cordray, Brooklyn. Public domain; image ­provided by Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Wallace’s design was a version of his 1848 proposal for a monument in New York. This one, however, was dedicated to Constitutional Union party presidential ­c andidate Edward Everett, a major financial contributor to the Mount Vernon L ­ adies ­A ssociation’s campaign to preserve Washington’s home.

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Nor did the two revivals, one before and one after the Civil War, really diverge on the rights of African Americans. Antislavery Know-­Nothings certainly fought for the freedom of enslaved Americans, but like many Democratic and Republican abolitionists, did not embrace a doctrine of equality. When Union general Jacob Cox bowed out of the race for Ohio governor because he did not share Republican support for Black suffrage, Donn Piatt was among those who agreed with Cox and whose names were circulated as potential replacements for him.8 The late nineteenth century similarly saw white Southerners and Northerners reuniting at the expense of African American civil rights, at times in a literal reunion, as in the fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg in 1913, when Woodrow Wilson proclaimed reconciliation to 50,000 all-­white veterans. Their new fraternalism, evident as well in the rise of a labor movement that at various moments excluded non-­white and “new” immigrant members, paralleled the tightening of Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised African American voters. Suitably for this stress on the reunited nation, the twentieth-­century Colonial Revival, in looking back to or recreating an era that permitted slavery, also implied a restoration of white supremacy.9 As meeting on a battlefield might indicate, the two moments and the two revivals were also linked by militant patriotism, a devotion to defending and expanding a Christian republic. Walcutt’s brother-­in-­law, Roswell Burchard, joined Wilson in speaking at Gettysburg in 1913, on “certain traditions,” unwritten, but handed down from George Washington, that required the U.S. to govern “all portions of the American continent” and resist “invasion by any Old World power.”10 Burchard, a proponent of military preparedness and a standing army, seems to have been thinking of European infringement on the Monroe Doctrine at a time when the Panama Canal was still under construction. But the unwritten political creed to which he referred had its origins in mid-­century justifications for both excluding immigrants (who were seen as subservient to foreign powers) and expanding American democracy to new territories. The continuity is evident in the antebellum rhetoric of workingman’s poet A. J. H. Duganne, in a poem he dedicated to Young America. “Where threats the danger?” he asks, and answers, “In yonder church” where “ermined Priestcraft sweeps the marble floors, / And— pauper thousands grovel at the doors!” To clarify he, adds, “In yonder crowd, with jesuit listener nigh; / In yonder home—where lurks a foreign spy!” The danger is in foreigners infiltrating the ballot box and the American government, so like Burchard he wishes the Atlantic were a wall of fire: “ ’Tis these we combat—these we would repel / Back from our Temple, to their native hell!”11

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Despite the occasional support of labor groups, the later Colonial Revival was boosted less by fraternal orders than by the creation of elite lineage-­based “historical” organizations that often quite explicitly made their goal the Americanization of immigrant populations. The Daughters of the American Revolution and the Colonial Dames are perhaps the best known, but Cleveland had its own Early Settlers’ Association, founded in 1880. Membership was a dollar a year and was limited to Native Sons and Daughters of the Early Reserve. It was a point of pride for members that the Reserve, the northeastern part of Ohio bordering on Lake Erie, had been a part of Connecticut and was still a bastion of New Englanders and their descendants. Focusing on these early settlers of the Reserve means that later immigrants, especially the Irish, are barely mentioned in their Annals. Writers with inherited credentials like Edwin Cowles, editor of the Cleveland Leader, who was known for his antislavery and “anti-­Romanist” sentiments, published in it. The Association, which initially met at the Presbyterian church on elegant Euclid Avenue, also had an official and very Protestant chaplain. Members at times worried about dangerous foreign or ethnic influences, especially in the wake of World War I.12 But the Early Settlers also included Harvey Rice, of the Plain Dealer and the Perry monument; Jack Ryder, the photographer of the monument and friend of Artemus Ward; Bolivar Butts, a Walcutt patron; and Thomas Jones Jr., the owner of the marble works that contracted for the Perry monument. The Association included an African American member, and the Association’s goal, to preserve recollections of the initial settlers, put it closer to the activities of historical societies (they eventually donated their collections to the Western Reserve Historical Society) than to promoters of patriotism. They not surprisingly took a historical and patriotic interest in the deterioration of the marble in the Perry monument. As one officer observed, no one had done more than the members of the Association to procure the monument and have it properly installed overlooking Lake Erie. Even their annual meeting was held on the anniversary of Perry’s victory, September 10. To replace the worn marble of the monument, which by then was located in Wade Park, the Early Settlers’ Association raised money to cast two bronze replicas from Walcutt’s original plaster model.13 Among the contributors were the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Daughters of 1812 ($100 each), the city’s fraternal associations ($280), and Cleveland’s Catholic bishop, a member of the Association ($60). At the dedication of the new bronze statue in Cleveland’s Gordon Park, where it once again overlooked Lake Erie, a local Republican official and poet rehearsed a familiar antebellum rhetoric that equated Protestant providentialism with Perry and the republic. While

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the “Red-­W hite-­and-­Blue” waved to all the world, because of a hero propitiously raised as a “Saviour for them in a promising land,” then “the God whom they loved was the God whom they praised,” for saving them from “foreign control” and “monarchial thralldom, the bane of the soul.”14 Walcutt’s original marble statue, minus its supporting sailors, somewhat ironically, given the initial competition between the sites, was eventually installed safely indoors at Perry’s Victory Visitor Center at Put-­in-­Bay near Sandusky. The state of Rhode Island installed the other bronze replica in Providence, in September of 1928 (fig. 74). Rhode Island was Perry’s home state, so it had a natural interest in the monument. But the chairman of the Rhode Island Perry Monument Commission was none other than Roswell Burchard, son of Walcutt’s father-­in-­law, the Reverend Samuel Burchard. As the former Speaker of the Rhode Island legislature, Burchard’s involvement in the presentation of the Perry statue to the State House symbolized both what Lincoln Steffens called the Republican machine, run by “good old American stock,” that controlled the country and its eventual twentieth-­century repudiation. Steffens explained in his 1905 expose of Rhode Island government that “many a good American thinks that if we could ‘keep the ignorant foreigner from voting,’ . . . if we could but devise some scheme of representation by which the balance of power could be given into the honest hands of the good old American stock out upon the healthy countryside we then should be saved. Rhode Island has such a scheme.”15 He was referring to Rhode Island’s restrictions on suffrage, which blocked immigrants and non-­property holders from voting, and which had ensured that Whigs or Republicans won every presidential election since Pierce in 1852 (and before Pierce, only Van Buren in 1836). This was combined with gerrymandering: Little Compton, where Roswell Burchard lived and wrote histories of the Congregational Church, could elect a state senator with seventy-­eight voters, just as the 29,000 mostly Catholic voters in Providence got one state senator. The result, in Steffens’s irony-­laden terms, was that the “best people” continued to rule, the “American stock pure,” producing what the Republican senators called “good government,” which meant subsidizing private business and corporations and cracking down on vice (prohibition of alcohol). Steffens was just as hard on the Republican machine in Cleveland, which he called “a government of the people by politicians hired to represent the privileged class.”16 The inauguration of Walcutt’s statue in Rhode Island was not precisely a campaign move, but it came two months before the 1928 presidential election, in which Republican Herbert Hoover defeated the first Roman Catholic to run for president, former New York governor Al Smith. The installation of the statue by prominent Republicans perhaps was intended as a

Conclusion

Figure 74. Rhode Island Perry Monument Commission, The Unveiling of the Statue of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, William Walcutt, Sculptor, at the State House, Providence, Rhode Island, Wednesday, September 19, at 2:30 p.m. Printed program, 1928. Collection of David and Isabel Walcutt. Public domain; image provided by author.

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bulwark against political changes in the state along the lines that reformers like Steffens advocated. Joining a Sons of the Revolution member and Burchard (Burchard also wrote a book defending George Washington’s character) on the speaker’s dais was the Episcopalian bishop of the state, James DeWolf Perry, who spoke of the courage necessary to stand alone for causes that were right, but unpopular, and of the Christian ideals that had founded the country. Burchard in his speech echoed the Young America militancy of the nineteenth century, arguing that the Perry monument symbolized the onward march of civilization for the freedom of mankind. As the idea of marching indicates, one theme of the ceremony, underscored by an extensive military presence, was American military “preparedness.” Burchard, like other patrician Progressives, advocated for universal military training as another mode of assimilating immigrants.17 The Progressive Republican governor of the state, Norman Case, continued the true American theme, emphasizing the “right of ancestry” that imbued Perry (who was the son of a soldier in the Revolution) with courage and devotion to his native land.18 Those words must have rung true for the proud descendants of Perry and Walcutt who unveiled the statue and possibly for the other members of the Rhode Island Perry Monument Commission. The commission members had been appointed by the previous Republican governor, from a French Catholic family, and included an architect who put historical friezes on his skyscraper, a legislator who advertised in Jewish newspapers, and the Catholic bishop of Rhode Island, who gave the invocation. Their presence points to the role of ethnic and Catholic voters in the steady increase of Democratic influence in the state. In fact, Democrat Woodrow Wilson took Rhode Island in 1912 (when the Republicans split between Theodore Roosevelt and William H. Taft), and Rhode Island in 1928 voted for Democrat Al Smith for president. It seems significant in this regard—the growing power of ethnic voters and the efforts of Republican progressives to capture them—that both Wilson and Burchard, an occasional Independent, were known for their 1913 speeches at Gettysburg. That occasion, and the Colonial Revival’s emphasis generally on a modern reconciliation of white Northerners and Southerners, defined whiteness in a way that would eventually (with the Immigration Act of 1965, which ended ethnic quotas) extend to non-­Protestant European immigrants, too. Walcutt’s fiery-­eyed Perry of 1928, even in the wake of 1927’s strict cap on immigration (150,000 total), carried with him Young America’s democratic idea of expanded suffrage, just as he had in 1860. The conservative momentum of the Colonial Revival of the 1920s and 1930s, though it preserved Walcutt’s statue, did little to raise Walcutt’s own

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profile. The Early Settlers Association barely mentions Walcutt; he is overshadowed by the expert artist hired to restore his statue. By the 1920s, Walcutt’s style would have seemed old-­fashioned, yet not “colonial” enough to warrant reviving. Indeed, the Association officers a little worriedly describe it as the “Older Baroque School of Sculpture,” though a very good example of it. The Association wanted to preserve the statue as a monument to the members’ own longevity in Cleveland and their patriotic dedication to their forefathers, not as an artistic achievement in a world that had embraced modernist abstract art. Walcutt’s picture of the toppling of the statue of King George fared somewhat better, though again it was appreciated primarily as a historical document of the eighteenth century, not as an artwork. It was auctioned in 1935 by a collector of American art who probably anticipated taking advantage of the interest stirred in the Revolution by the 1932 bicentennial of Washington’s birth. The later of the two versions that Walcutt painted was bought by Lafayette College, a Presbyterian men’s college named after the Revolutionary hero. The earlier painting was owned by a minister and officer of the American Bible Society who, during the Cold War era, started to encourage popular magazines to reproduce it, in histories with titles like We Americans—but again, as a symbol of patriotic American character, not American art.19 It has taken the rise of what is perhaps erroneously called “populism” in the twenty-­first century, a movement that expresses fears about immigration and ethnicity, to lead to a reevaluation not only of Walcutt but of antebellum nativism. Rather than dismissing the Know-­Nothings as a marginal group with a name that invites mockery, scholars have realized that Whitney’s Republic was, in a way, right: the ideas of the Order of United Americans are inextricably part of the fabric of both Democratic and Republican parties, of flag-­waving patriotism, and of both American working-­class fraternal and upper-­class aristocratic culture.20 At the same time, Walcutt’s liberalism, as Louise Taft, the mother of President William Howard Taft described it, or the liberalism of the democratic movements of the nineteenth century, continued to play an equally lasting role in American culture, especially within the Republican Party. The Walcutts had a long connection with the Tafts.21 In 1857 and then again in 1859, Walcutt and his wife visited Louise and Alphonso Taft in Cincinnati to paint their portraits and those of Alphonso’s parents. Alphonso Taft knew Donn Piatt from the Cincinnati Literary Club, but it seems equally likely that Walcutt was introduced to Taft by Taft’s law partner and Yale classmate Aaron Perry. A New Englander like Taft, Perry had started his career in Walcutt’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and Walcutt’s list of paintings includes a portrait of Perry’s daughter, from Columbus, “from

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recollection.” Perry was an antislavery Whig, who, again like Taft, was an early and influential member of the Republican Party in Ohio.22 His wife, like Louise Taft and Agnes Walcutt, was involved with the arts; Mrs. Perry and Mrs. Taft became president and vice president, respectively, of the Women’s Art Museum Association in Cincinnati. When the Walcutts were in town, they joined the Perrys and Tafts at the opera (Agnes Walcutt did the Taft ladies’ hair), for whist and euchre, and for parties, and even—thereby earning Louise’s praise for their religious liberalism—twice attended Moncure Conway’s Unitarian church with the Tafts.23 Conway was a radical, not only in his outspoken abolitionism, but especially in advocating that the Unitarians move toward a strictly humanitarian religion that eliminated the supernatural. As that might suggest, when Cincinnati’s Superior Court allowed the Cincinnati Board of Education to continue reading the Protestant Bible in the public schools, Alphonso Taft wrote an important dissent advocating separation of church and state.24 Nor is it surprising that when Taft was nominated for governor, he was defeated by a candidate more dedicated than he was to rebuking the Democrats for their “subserviency to Roman Catholic demands.”25 In arguing against religious education in the schools, in an odd way—given the Know-­Nothing support for reading the Protestant Bible in the schools— Taft demonstrated the powerful influence of nativism in Ohio. Its political impact became visible in 1844, the same year it did in New York City. In 1844, even though the Democrat, James Polk, won the presidency, every American Republican (nativist) candidate in Columbus, Ohio, who ran for Congress also won. Columbus Whigs like Walcutt and Perry would undoubtedly have taken note. The nativist influence in Ohio politics thereafter waxed and waned, but when Alphonso Taft began to organize the Republican Party in the 1850s, he worked intimately with the president of the Cincinnati Know-­ Nothings, a man whom Taft’s biographer describes as his “close personal and political friend.” Taft himself defended the British ambassador in a case that pitted Irish American nationalists against both England and nativists in Cincinnati.26 Perry, for that matter, was a partner with a Republican editor in Columbus who was friendly to the Know-­Nothings (as valuable allies), and Ohio’s 1859 Republican governor, William Dennison, whom Walcutt had also painted, fell into the same camp. Ohio Republicans like Taft knew they owed their success to a fusion of German Protestant immigrants, Know-­ Nothings, and antislavery Whigs and Democrats—much the same coalition evident in the mustering of support for Walcutt’s Perry monument in 1860. As Luke Ritter points out, to keep Whigs, nativists, and immigrants together in the postwar era required transforming the Know-­Nothing Party’s

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anti-­Catholicism into a higher ideal: a policy of divorcing church and state. Even at the height of Know-­Nothing power in Ohio in 1854 and 1855, when with the Republicans (the “People’s State Ticket”) they swept all the state offices, the American Party in Ohio already emphasized that they were not hostile to religious differences, or even to immigrants, but only to religious influence (“Romanism”) in politics and the state.27 Alphonso Taft’s choice of William Walcutt for his family’s portraits—a genre of painting that emphasizes the continuity of the family across time—was, in a sense, a visualization of that lineage of Know-­Nothings and Republicans. Louise Taft said the portrait of Alphonso’s father, a judge himself, was the most satisfactory of all the Walcutt portraits (fig. 75). Walcutt captured Peter Rawson Taft’s kind expression, which reflects his role in smoothing over the rifts between his religious wife and his more broad-­minded politically and religiously liberal son and daughter-­in-­law.28 Alphonso Taft’s son William Howard Taft would as president veto a literacy test as a requirement for immigrants—despite testimony from the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, a name that harkens back to the

Figure 75. William ­Walcutt, Portrait of Peter Rawson Taft, 1859, oil on canvas, 26 x 32 inches, William Howard Taft ­National Historic Site, Cincinnati, Ohio. Public domain; photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, image provided by Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

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nativist order of the 1850s. Even during the wave of new immigration from southern Europe, Taft gave speeches praising the United States’ Catholic heritage and its history of religious tolerance.29 These claims were essential to the Progressive Republican identity, particularly its mission of creating a benevolent global U.S. empire, but also in battling evangelical Populists like William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner. Yet inevitably, in embracing that mission of a world-­girdling republic, of asserting economic if not territorial hegemony, they echoed nineteenth-­century poets and artists like Walcutt: to redeem the world, the Stars and Stripes must be planted on America’s revolutionary and native ground.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been written without a Mellon Fellowship at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-­Salem, North Carolina. Dean Charles O’Connor of the Hixson-­Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts and Director Francisco Souto of the School of Art, Art History & Design, at the University of Nebraska-­Lincoln, kindly permitted me to take up the position. Administrators, faculty, staff, and students at Wake Forest University ensured that the fellowship was a wonderful intellectual and personal experience. University administrators Dean Franco, Eric Stottlemyer, Michele Gillespie, and Bernadine Barnes opened many doors for me; art historians David Lubin, Jay Curley, Morna O’Neill, Nikki Moore, and Peggy Smith demonstrated truly enviable excellence in teaching, scholarship, and collegiality; fellow faculty Tom Frank, Stephanie Koscak, and Andrew Gurstelle generously shared their time and vast knowledge of early modern history and material culture. Jennifer Finkel, Carrie Johnston, Daniel Ackermann, and Heather McMahon joined in my efforts to revive the Colonial Revival, and with Tom, Morna, Stephanie, Peggy, and Andrew, their humor, thoughtfulness, and awareness of American history, art history, urban history, and artifacts made our monthly discussions a real pleasure. At Reynolda House, I was surrounded by fabulous art and even more marvelous people. Allison Perkins and Phil Archer were gracious, charming, and astute guides to Reynolda’s history and collections, and Allison Slaby, Amber Albert, Bari Helms, and Julia Hood have created a remarkable community of expertise on American art and culture. It was a pleasure to work at the museum with Susan Piribek, Stephan Dragisic, Cindy Byrd, John

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164 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Cunningham, Erin Kye, Reggie Cunningham, Julianne Miao, Beth DeBerry, Sara Morales, Aaron Canipe, Kaci Baez, and Karl Erik. I also am indebted for excellent advice about navigating the North Carolina and Wake Forest landscape, resources, and community to Nathan Peifer, Gail Bretan, James Harper, Page Laughlin, Paul Bright, Barbara Macri, and Doug Bland. My special thanks go to friends in North Carolina who welcomed me into their homes for wonderful conversations about art, history, dogs, family, Winston-­Salem, and much more: Genie Carr, Debbie Rubin, Tom Frank, Phil Archer, Allison Perkins, and Libby and David Lubin. My research was also made possible by the assistance of scholars of American art and literature whom I feel fortunate to count as friends: Peter Betjemann, Christin Mamiya, Alan Wallach, Theresa Leininger-­Miller, and Carma Gorman. Kenneth M. Price, as he always does, created a happy home for Scuppernong and me in both Winston-­Salem and Nebraska. I was assisted by many curators and archivists, but particularly Ruth M. Horstman at the Taft National Historic Site, who generously transcribed letters for me. My thanks also go to Becky Odom at the Ohio History Connection, Beth Carter at the Kentucky Historical Society, Susan Logan at the Delaware County Historical Society, Sue Snapp at the Franklin County Genealogical Society, Lori Baudro at the Columbus City Art Commission, Freeman’s Auction, and Charles Irwin and Karren DeSeve for sharing images and information. In Winston-­Salem, I very much appreciated the opportunity to delve into the archives of the Sovereign Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. I have also been fortunate to work with the thoughtful editors at Fordham University Press, especially Fred Nachbaur, Will Cerbone, Eric Newman, and Aldene Fredenburg. Funding for color images was provided by a Hixson-­Lied Faculty Research Grant. At the heart of this study are David and Isabel Walcutt. Ever since Michiko Okaya, who has always been exceptionally helpful, connected me with David, he has been a model of scholarly generosity. He happily shared the results of his and Isabel’s decades of detective work in Ohio, New York, and France, tracking down Walcutt artworks, references, and biography, and provided introductions to other family members and collectors. John Walcutt possesses the Walcutt enthusiasm for history and adds to it an eye for photography. All the Walcutts welcomed me into their homes and archives, as did Margaret Piatt and her assistant, Robbin Ferriman, who have created a circle of friends at the Piatt Castle that Donn and Louise Piatt might have envied. David and Isabel, with the other modern descendants of these nineteenth-­century Ohioans, made researching William Walcutt a delight. This book is dedicated to them.

Notes

Preface: Why William Walcutt?

1. A city directory shows a William Walcutt, portrait painter, living at 34 Walker in 1841; his more permanent move came later. 2. Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938), articulated this argument, which influenced a generation of intellectual historians; see also John Bodo, Protestant Clergy and Public Issues, 1812–1848 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), and Clifford S. Griffin, Their Brothers’ Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960), the latter of which emphasized the role of religion in social control. However, many historians have focused instead on the economic and political motivations for nativism, and while I cite them throughout the book, the important role of ministers in supporting art as well as reform means that religion is emphasized in this study. 3. See Mark Lause, A Secret Society History of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 23, 49, 30–32, on George Lippard’s Brotherhood of the Union, a secret fraternity. Lippard, though more anticlerical than anti-­Catholic, wrote a book featuring international Catholic conspiracies to take over the West, preventing it from becoming a worker’s utopia; Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 19. Lippard was married by Charles Chauncey Burr, one of Walcutt’s sitters. 4. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 4. 5. Its continuity is also suggested by Southern Democrat Enoch Wood Perry’s The True American (1874), Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting satirizes the consumers of nativist literature as asses, but it is the newspaper itself that creates a 165

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barrier between the excluded and included; see Jennifer A. Greenhill, Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 58–65. 6. A number of scholars have emphasized the important role of Protestant religion; see especially David Bjelajac, Millenial Desire and the Apocalyptic Vision of Washington Allston (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1988); John Davis, The Landscape of Belief (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Gail Husch, Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid-­Nineteenth-­Century Painting (Lebanon, N.H.: University of New England Press, 2000); David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, The Visual Culture of American Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Charles Colbert, Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 7. See Michael W. Hughey, “Americanism and Its Discontents: Protestantism, Nativism, and Political Heresy in America,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 533–53. 8. Numerous scholars have pointed out the class basis for these views; Alan Wallach’s “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 66, no. 1 (1990): 35–45, is a clear statement of this. More generally on nativism and landscape painters, see Paul A. Manoguerra, “Anti-­ Catholicism in Albert Bierstadt’s Roman Fish Market, Arch of Octavius,” Nineteenth-­ Century Art Worldwide 2 (Winter 2003), http://www.19thc-­artworldwide.org/winter03/ 245–anti-­catholicism-­in-­albert-­bierstadts-­roman-­fish-­market-­arch-­of-­octavius, and Sally M. Promey, “The “Return” of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 3 (September 2003): 581–603. 9. Kenneth Myers, The Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists in the Mountains, 1820–1895 (Yonkers, N.Y.: Hudson River Museum of Westchester, 1987), 51–52, 66–68, compares the structure of Thomas Cole’s several paintings of the Catskill Mountain House to a pilgrimage, in that a lone pilgrim in the foreground must cross great distances to achieve his white heavenly home on the mountain top. The brother of L. G. Clark, editor of the Knickerbocker, described signing the hotel register as adding his name to the book of the Elect. Charles L. Beach leased the hotel in 1839 and developed the trails around the hotel to expand the views possible so as to keep tourists for an entire week. 10. Stephen M. Silverman and Raphael D. Silver, The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2015). On artists catering to the taste of Mountain House visitors, see Kevin Avery, “Gifford and the Catskills,” in Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, ed. Kevin Avery and Franklin Kelly (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), 30–37, 142–44. 11. Samuel F. B. Morse’s American Society for Promoting National Unity (New York: John F. Trow, 1861) interpreted the Declaration of Independence as a program for a Protestant government that permitted inequality—specifically, slavery. Among

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its proposed participants were a mix of pro-­Compromise Unionists and nativists— as, for example, Millard Fillmore, Lewis Cass, August Belmont, Samuel Houston, Edward Everett, George Bancroft, Stephen A. Douglas, James Harper, A. T. Stewart, and James Brooks. Morse as a founder of the National Academy of Design was its first president, from 1826 to 1845, and then again from May 1861 to 1862; see Eliot Clark, History of the National Academy of Design, 1825–1953 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 76–77. 12. David Walcutt donated to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art William Walcutt’s manuscript of “Journal of a Voyage from New York City to London” (1852), a second notebook of “Notes on a Voyage from New York City to London,” typed transcriptions of both, a European Sketchbook (c. 1853), and several letters written by William to his sons from 1878 to 1880. David Walcutt also very generously shared his own collection of Walcutt references, including a photocopy of Agnes Walcutt’s remembrance book and an Index to a Sketchbook in a private collection. John Walcutt also kindly shared his collection of paintings and memorabilia. Another William Walcutt sketchbook, no longer bound, of mostly landscapes from around Mount Vernon, New York, is owned by the Bruce Walcutt family in Austin, Texas. 13. See for example, Mark Lause, Young America: Land, Labor and the Republican Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 14. Because nativists often wrote of “Native Americans” as part of their rhetoric, when I refer to Indigenous people I use “American Indians” or where possible a specific tribal name. For generic, stereotyped figures in literature or art, I quote and retain the language of mid-century, which described them as red men, savages, and Indians, to distinguish them from my own references. Introduction: Fraternalism and True American Iconography

1. On United Americans’ imagery, see the valuable Bruce Levine, “Conservatism, Nativism and Slavery: Thomas R. Whitney and the Origins of the Know-­Nothing Party,” Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (September 2001): 455–88. 2. See, for example, Robert Ernst, “Economic Nativism in New York City,” New York History 29, no. 2 (April 1948): 170–86, or Humphrey Joseph Desmond, The Know-­Nothing Party: A Sketch (Washington, D.C.: New Century Press, 1904), which cites an 1854 membership roster as composed of men paying far below the average tax, when they paid taxes at all. See also Jean Hales, “The Shaping of Nativist Sentiment, 1848–1860” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1973). 3. Young Sam was a vehicle for wealthy businessman George Law’s 1856 American Party candidacy for president. It was edited by British émigré Thomas Powell and James Abbott and employed music critic Henry C. Watson, plus British artist/writer Thomas W. Whitley and Charles G. Rosenberg. The men had a history of collaboration: Walcutt and Whitley would illustrate a Jenny Lind book, and Rosenberg wrote a book on Lind as well as a collection of celebrity vignettes, (as Q), You Have Heard of Them (New York: Redfield, 1854), that included fairy tale

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collector Hans Christian Anderson. All of them worked for other periodicals, too, often together, including Watson and Powell at Frank Leslie’s (Leslie was also involved with Lind’s promotion), and Whitley and Powell at the Lantern and New Jersey’s Hudson County Democrat. In 1853, Powell was made an honorary member of the New York Sketch Club, which was founded by Walcutt and other artists who worked for the Lantern and Frank Leslie’s and which had a contingent of George Law supporters. 4. See David Bjelajac, American Art: A Cultural History (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005), 86–90. 5. George Emery and J. C. Herbert Emery, A Young Man’s Benefit: The Independent Order of Odd-­Fellows and Sickness Insurance in the United States and Canada, 1860–1929 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1999); Jean Gould Hales, “Co-­L aborers in the Cause: Women in the Ante-­bellum Nativist Movement,” Civil War History 25, no. 2 (June 1979): 123, on Philadelphia’s Washington Female Native American Association of Southwark in 1848. 6. Trumbull’s painting included another more active Black American soldier, but he is not often visible in prints; see Patricia Burnham, “John Trumbull, Historian: The Case of the Battle of Bunker’s Hill,” in Redefining American History Painting, ed. Patricia Burnham and Lucretia Giese (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47–48. George Washington hung two 1799 prints after Trumbull’s painting prominently in Mount Vernon. Nathaniel Currier issued a lithograph of Trumbull’s battle scene before 1856, as did engraver Thomas W. Strong. Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence was also common in Know-­ Nothing imagery. Trumbull left his art collection to Yale, an evangelical bastion. 7. Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 208. 8. A very helpful guide is Thomas J. Curran, “The Know-­Nothings of New York State” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1963). 9. The historical literature on nativism is extensive, and I cite specific works throughout; Dale T. Knobel, “America for the Americans:” The Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne, 1996), emphasizes fraternalism. 10. William Ross Wallace, “Old Abe’s Address to the Wide Awakes: Freemen, On with Me,” Sunday Dispatch, November 3, 1859, 7. See also Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know-­Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 268–69. 11. Americanus, letter to the editor, Plain Dealer, April 15, 1859, 1. On the connections between the Democrats and nativism, see also Stephen Hansen and Paul Nygard, “Stephen A. Douglas, the Know-­Nothings, and the Democratic Party in Illinois, 1854–1858,” Illinois Historical Journal 87, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 109–30. 12. In 1854, Ullmann received 122,282 votes, versus Democrat Horatio Seymour’s 156,495; Greene C. Bronson also ran as a Democrat and cut into Seymour’s vote. The winner, Whig Myron H. Clark, with 156,804 votes, was said to be a Know-­Nothing too, though not openly (he campaigned on temperance). On 1855, see Louis Dow

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Scisco, “Political Nativism in New York State” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1901), 167–69. 13. Many of these and other publications that I cite throughout the book are available as page images or roughly indexed by my notes at www.katzsnewspapers.org. 14. Holden had a financial interest in Island City. It was edited by Henry A. Buckingham and published by Odd Fellow William B. Smith, who also published Henry H. Snelling’s Photographic Art Journal; Anna Snelling, Henry’s wife, like Walcutt wrote for Thomas R. Whitney’s official OUA organ the Republic, which noticed the monthly photo journal. 15. Frederick Saunders and Thomas B. Thorpe, A Voice to America: Or, The Model Republic, Its Glory, Or Its Fall: With a Review of the Causes of the Decline and Failure of the Republics of South America, Mexico, and of the Old World; Applied to the Present Crisis in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: E. Walker, 1855). British-­ born Frederick Saunders was a Harper’s editor who also published with T. W. Strong and DeWitt and Davenport. Thorpe was a contributor to and later editor of the Spirit of the Times, a $5 journal that specialized in sports, theater, and southwestern stories. Others of its contributors, like John of York (William C. Tobey), appeared in the nativist Republic. Pipe-­Stems, “Miscellany,” Spirit of the Times, November 20, 1852, mentions that his old friend James Cafferty is president of the New York Sketch Club and has capital portraits in his studio. Benson J. Lossing, Seventeen Hundred and Seventy-­Six, Or, The War of Independence: A History of the Anglo-­Americans (New York: Edward Walker, 1852). 16. Diane Casey, “Benson Lossing: His Life and Work, 1830–1860,” Courier 20, no. 1 (1985): 84. John Dowling was a Baptist minister. Cornelia M. Dowling, “Voyage of Life,” in American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum (New York: Edward Walker, 1856), 51, is a conservative paean to painter Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life, characterizing it as progress toward endless rest—toward the end of all progress. 17. “Fairy Tales and Legends,” Holden’s Dollar Magazine, December 1848, 759–60; Carlos D. Stuart, “American Fine Art and Artists,” Republic, June 1851, 259. Holden’s editorial successors, Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews, in February 1851, on pages 94 and 95, praised Strong’s Illustrated News for adding the name “American,” as well as both Stuart’s and Walcutt’s poetry. Sketch Club members like John Savage and Mathews and Republic contributors like Fanny Green, Uriah H. Judah, and J. W. Orr all contributed to the later Holden’s. 18. Frank Leslie’s newspaper had a Democratic tilt; early editors, most of whom had nativist ties, include T. B. Thorpe, Henry C. Watson (Young Sam), Odd Fellow Park Benjamin, and former Express writer W. J. A. Fuller. See Budd Leslie Gambee Jr., “Frank Leslie and His Illustrated Newspaper, 1855–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1963), and Madeleine Stern, Purple Passage: The Life of Mrs. Frank Leslie (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953). 19. Mark Thistlethwaite, “The Image of George Washington: Studies in Mid-­ Nineteenth-­Century History Painting” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1977); William Ayres, ed., Picturing History, American Painting, 1770–1930 (New

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York: Rizzoli, 1993); William Gerdts and Mark Thistlethwaite, Grand Illusions: History Painting in America (Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 1988). 20. Carlos D. Stuart, “Flag of Stripes and Stars,” Republic, June 1851, 262. William Walcutt, “Origin of the Stars and Stripes,” manuscript attached to “Notes of a Voyage from New York City to London,” 1852, pages not numbered, Walcutt Papers, Archives of American Art. See also William Kerrigan, “ ‘ Young America!’: Romantic Nationalism in Literature and Politics, 1843–1861” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, 1997). 21. Reverend Gilbert Darlington, letter dated October 16, 1968, to Mrs. Virginia Lee, copy owned by David Walcutt. Treasurer of the American Bible Society for forty-­one years, he owned the painting, which is now in a private collection. On Darlington, see Paul Gutjahr, “American Protestant Bible Illustration from Copper Plates to Computers,” in The Visual Culture of American Religions, ed. David Morgan and Sally Promey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 276–77. 22. F. A. Chapman, “Thanksgiving at a New England Farmhouse,” Harper’s Weekly, December 9, 1871, 1,164; Thomas Nast, “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,” Harper’s Weekly, November 20, 1869, 145. See also Patricia Hills, “Cultural Racism: Resistance and Accommodation in the Civil War Art of Eastman Johnson and Thomas Nast,” in Seeing High & Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 103–23. 23. “Lafayette and Professor Morse,” Metropolitan (Baltimore), April 1858, 144–55. See Wendy Greenhouse, “Daniel Huntington and the Ideal of Christian Art,” Winterthur Portfolio 31, no. 2/3 (Summer–Autumn 1996): 103–40; John Davis, “Catholic Envy,” in The Visual Culture of American Religions, ed. David Morgan and Sally Promey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 105–28, and Wendy Katz, Humbug! (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 109–11. A review of Huntington’s The Republican Court in the Time of Washington (1861), New York Tribune, October 21, 1865, was quoted in Thistlethwaite, The Image of George Washington, 172. The reviewer sees Washington delivering his farewell address, a favorite Know-­Nothing moment. It was exhibited at the Derby Gallery in New York. 24. On Morse, see Paul Staiti, Samuel F. B. Morse (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 25. See William J. Phalen, “But They Did Not Build This House: The Attitude of Evangelical Protestantism Towards Immigration to the United States, 1800–1924” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 2010), 20–41. 26. On the significance of Pilgrim pictures to defining national origins, see Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999). On Matteson, see Harriet Groeschel, “Study of the Life and Work of Tompkins H. Matteson” (M.A. thesis, Syracuse University, 1985). 27. Quoted in Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 202. Thistlethwaite,

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The Image of George Washington, 179n37, observes that Matteson’s First Prayer in Congress (1848?) was probably intended as a companion engraving to Matteson’s Washington Delivering His Inaugural Address (1848/49). The painted version of First Prayer was purchased by the American Art-­Union. 28. Episcopalian genre painter Francis Edmonds (who had been employed at a mechanics’ bank) recommended the Art-­Union buy them in 1845; in 1847, it bought Matteson’s First Sabbath of the Pilgrims, and in 1849 a romantic genre scene, Now or Never. Edmonds’ genre scene Taking the Census (1854) included a portrait of George Washington observing the scene from over the fireplace. 29. See especially Yonatan Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 125–54; and Merle Curti, “Young America,” American Historical Review 32, no. 1 (October 1926): 34–55. On Day and printers, see Alexander Saxton, “Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press,” American Quarterly 36 (1984): 211–34. 30. Israel Post, publisher of the Columbian and Union, was more closely aligned politically with Matteson than his literary editors were. Henry Sadd was the regular engraver for Post; J. I. [John Inman], “Spirit of 76,” Columbian, April 1846. Poet William Ross Wallace contributed to both magazines and Charles Burkhardt to the Union; both supported Young America and nativism. 31. Lewis Clark, “Freedom’s Holy Cause,” Odd-­Fellows’ Offering for 1851 (New York: Edward Walker, 1850), 291–94; Clark W. Bryan, “Freedom’s Holy Cause,” Odd-­Fellows’ Offering for 1851 (New York: Edward Walker, 1850), 289–90. Matteson’s picture in the Offering (between pages 292 and 293), retitled Freedom’s Holy Cause, was the engraving by H. S. Sadd, who was often employed by the American Art-­Union. 32. Lester’s collection of artist’s biographies was published in 1846 by Baker and Scribner, a firm that published books illustrated by Walcutt, too; Lester, “Reading of the English Bible,” in Odd-­Fellows’ Offering for 1850 (New York: Edward Walker, 1849), 219–27, with an engraving by McRae. See also Benson Lossing, An Outline History of the Fine Arts (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1841). Lossing collaborated with Matteson on designs for the Odd-­Fellows’ Offering for 1848 and wrote for them on several religious subjects, including the rainbow’s symbolism (it was an Odd Fellows’ symbol) as Covenant and American Enterprise. F. Saunders wrote on West Point and the importance of keeping the Sabbath. Minister and politician Joel T. Headley and Odd Fellow Ned Buntline are among the other contributors who were associated with nativism. “Ned Buntline” was the pseudonym for Edward Z. C. Judson, whose books on working-­class New Yorkers like his newspaper often had nativist themes. 33. C. Edwards Lester, “Washington’s Marriage,” in Odd-­Fellows’ Offering for 1851 (New York: Edward Walker, 1850), 9–15. Matteson’s Spirit of ’76 was also reproduced in the 1861 Ladies’ Repository, which in January 1849 praised Stearns’s Marriage of George Washington; Thistlethwaite, Image of George Washington, 28–29, 44.

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34. W. C. Bryant, “Seventy-­Six,” in Wide-­Awake Gift (New York: J. C. Derby, 1855) 122–23. Matteson’s engraving was accompanied by Jane Gay Fuller’s “The Heart of Seventy-­Six,” 71–73, on the patriotic sacrifices of the women in the picture. 35. The patron for the 1853 painting was William D. White of Albany. Matteson’s story “The Witch” first appeared in the Odd-­Fellows’ Offering for 1847 (New York: John Treadwell, 1846), according to the Odd Fellows’ Golden Rule, September 25, 1847. Cornelius Mathews’s play Witchcraft, featuring a young man defending his mother, had a brief run at the Bowery in 1846. 36. Mrs. J. Webb, “On the Dedication of the Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church,” Golden Rule, October 9, 1847. In June 26, 1847, the weekly’s editor, a minister, noted that Catholic bishops in Baltimore condemned the Odd Fellows, so the nativist New York Observer now praised the order; and gave a carefully objective review (praising its patient research) to a book, Papacy or Popery, by a determined opponent of the Catholic Church. The Odd Fellows’ editor, however, on May 1, 1847, was in favor of sending the flood of immigrants to the West. 37. The DAR requires proof of descent from a revolutionary war soldier; see Wanda M. Corn, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983). Leutze’s painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 38. On Leutze, see Jochen Wierich, Grand Themes: Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, and American History Painting (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2012), and Barbara S. Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 1816–1868: Freedom Is the Only King (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975). 39. “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” in American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum (New York: Edward Walker, 1856), 278–81. 40. J. T. Headley, Washington and His Generals (Baker and Scribner, 1847). It was a successor to Headley’s popular Napoleon and His Marshals (1846) and followed by an Illustrated Life of Washington (1857), which, illustrated, invented pious moments like Washington praying at Valley Forge. It was combined with Lossing’s “Mount Vernon as It Is,” in 1859, by publishers G. & F. Bill. Daniel Huntington based a painting of Washington and his Generals on Headley’s book. 41. Leutze did at least six paintings of Columbus; his 1843 Columbus Before the Queen is at the Brooklyn Museum. His 1848 Storming of Teocalli is at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. 42. There were rival almanacs in 1855: W. S. Tisdale’s Know-­Nothing Almanac and True American’s Manual for 1855 (New York, 1855), with woodcuts by Lossing, and the smaller Know-­Nothing Almanac (New York: T. W. Strong, 1855). Sketch Club member John McLenan, like Gunn, contributed both to Strong’s almanacs and to John Brougham’s Lantern. See also “Thomas Butler Gunn,” in The Vault at Pfaff ’s, ed. Edward Whitley and Rob Weidman, pfaffs.web.lehigh.edu. 43. Strong published the Illustrated News in 1851, with Carlos D. Stuart and William Fairman as editors. In the same year Stuart and Fairman also edited (in a neighboring office) the New-­Yorker, which was very supportive of Walcutt’s Sketch Club and the American Artists Association.

NOTES TO PAGES 23–26

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1. A Native-­Born Artist

1. On Howland and the American Tract Society and John W. and Nathaniel Orr, see David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 61–65, 69–70. The Orrs were born in Ireland. Nathaniel did a lot of work for the General Protestant Episcopal S.S. Union and Church Book Society. Howland also worked for the American Tract Society. The Orrs were seemingly unrelated to either Hector Orr, editor of the nativist National American, or John Sayers Orr, an anti-­Catholic street preacher from British Guiana. The brothers were partners from 1844 to 1846 and then had independent wood engraving firms. John studied wood engraving with William Redfield, brother of Justus Redfield, publisher of the Family Magazine, which gave Benson Lossing his first editorial job in 1838–39. John, a friend of poet William Ross Wallace, began publishing the American Odd Fellow in 1862. 2. “Kissing the Pope’s Toe,” Republic 1, no. 3, March 1851, 130; W. S. Tisdale, Know-­Nothing Almanac and True American’s Manual for 1855 (New York, 1855), 7. On illustration’s conflation of republican virtue with Protestant mission, see David Morgan, “For Christ and the Republic,” in The Visual Culture of American Religions, ed. David Morgan and Sally Promey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 49–67. 3. Harold E. Mahan, Benson J. Lossing and Historical Writing in the US, 1830–90 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996), 120, cites Lossing’s History of New York City, in which he denies Native Americanism but attacks Irish political power; Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851), 1:33. Lossing’s Pictorial Sketchbook of the War of 1812 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868), 540, illustrated Walcutt’s statue of Commodore Perry in Cleveland. 4. Walcutt’s poem “O Come to the Mountains,” Sun, February 5, 1849, was picked up by the Whig Southport American on May 30, 1849. He also had a poem in the Democratic Evening Post on October 10, 1850, a period when that paper was reporting positively about Walcutt’s American Artists Association. 5. Uriah H. Judah, b. 1810, a Jewish temperance writer (his cousin De Witt Clinton Judah wrote for the Poughkeepsie Casket, which Lossing had edited), was one of the Republic’s stable of contributors and a visitor to Walcutt’s studio. Likely a Democrat, he signed the U.S. Congress’s Memorial of Merchants, Mechanics, &c., of the City of New York, Against the Renewal of the Charter of the Bank of the United States, 23rd Cong., 1st Sess., 1834. H. Doc. 89, as did J. H. Howland & Sons (perhaps related to William Howland the engraver?), Israel Post, the publisher of Tompkins Matteson’s illustrated magazines the Union and the Columbian, and George P. Morris. Other signatories have names that suggest a relationship to artists in Walcutt’s circle: several Blauvelts and Lockwoods, Henry Hagen, and so on. Judah also supported Irish relief in 1847. Another memorial and a city directory list him as a commercial merchant. He married Gertrude Simonson and attended J. B. Seixas’s (Seixas also signed the Memorial) Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, as did M. M. Noah, an editor who had worked with Whitney in the 1840s and who contributed tales of Jewish religion to Odd

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Fellow Offerings. Uriah’s cousin, Emanuel Judah, played the title role of Mazeppa (see Chapter 3) when the play first came to New York in 1833. It would be performed regularly at the Bowery. 6. Photocopy of Agnes Leeds’s autograph book, c. 1848, owned by David Walcutt; original owned by Mrs. Virginia Lee of Cos Cob, Connecticut. 7. William Walcutt, “Painting—Its Origin and History,” Daguerreian Journal, March 15, 1851, 267. This two-­part history stressed the development of geometry (perspective) and illusionism generally, addressing an audience of photographers as fellow fine artists rather than mechanics. The strong stress on virtue may have reflected an awareness of the need among photographers, especially, to distinguish the nude from pornography. 8. Michael Gordon, The Orange Riots: Irish Political Violence in New York City, 1870 and 1871 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 207. 9. William Cullen Bryant, “Preface,” in Scribner’s Popular History of the United States (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), 1:ix. Sydney Howard Gay, one of the coauthors of the history, was Bryant’s editorial assistant at the Evening Post. Swedish-­ born illustrator de Thulstrup worked for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Monthly, Scribner’s, and Century. 10. Congregationalist minister Hervey Wilbur’s edition of The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments (New York: N. & J. White, 1833) followed the guidelines of the American Bible Society. The Walcutt family’s copy is in the collection of John and Mary Anne Walcutt. Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religious and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 84, notes that George P. Morris’s “My Mother’s Bible” became a popular hymn; “Literary Institutions at Granville,” Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio (Cincinnati: The Author, 1850), 295. 11. Burchard attended Centre College in Danville, Kentucky; Rossiter Johnson and John Howard Brown, The Twentieth-­Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, vol. 2 (Boston: Biographical Society, 1904), n.p. 12. Charles C. Cole Jr., “The Free Church Movement in New York City,” New York History 34, no. 3 (July 1953): 284–97. 13. William Walcutt is buried in an unmarked grave at Greenwood, in the Leeds family plot. Agnes’s father was Henry Leeds, of the firm Nesmith & Leeds, Brooklyn. Walcutt carved the sculpture for his wife’s grave, of a woman with a lyre. 14. “The Explosion,” New York Tribune, February 6 and 7, 1850; “Monument to Young Tindale,” America’s Own, July 6; and “A Monument to Young Tindale,” America’s Own, November 23, 1850. 15. On the Protestant cemetery, see McDannell, Material Christianity, 111. H. L. Stuart was also involved in creating the $1,500–2,500 monument, as were ministers George Peck (editor of the Christian Advocate and Journal) and Gardiner Spring. Walcutt painted a Mr. and Mrs. Peck. 16. Edmund B. Child’s initial subeditor was E. S. Manning, with Parsons E. Day replacing Manning in October 1849. Parsons Day, a descendant of General Joseph

NOTES TO PAGES 30–33

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Warren of Bunker Hill fame, was a member of Lippard’s Brotherhood of the Union; Mark Lause, A Secret Society History of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 25, 41. Finley Johnson and Thomas Shankland joined the paper in 1854. Child had also edited a workingwoman’s journal, the Lady’s Own. In Cincinnati, he attended art collector and minister Elias Magoon’s church. Magoon, whom Child saw as a fellow mechanic, donated his art collection to Vassar, with Samuel Morse and Benson Lossing as supervisors of the collection. Two of Walcutt’s sons married Child sisters. 17. Julia Dean’s English mother, Julia Drake, had been married to poet William W. Fosdick’s father in Ohio; when he died, she married Edwin Dean, an actor based in New York. Julia (an Episcopalian) married a son of Senator Robert Hayne, a famous opponent of Daniel Webster, in 1855, to Ohio sculptor T. D. Jones’s dismay; Jones had courted her. 18. “The Stereotyped Lie,” America’s Own, April 14, 1849. The paper saw allies in workingmen’s advocates with nativist ties like George Lippard, A. J. H. Duganne, and Ned Buntline. On nativism and the workingmen’s movement, see Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), and Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (London and New York: Verso, 1987). 19. Redpath, for example, wrote as Ason O’Faust, in America’s Own, March 19, 1852; he also wrote as J. R. 20. On labor, see Dale T. Knobel, “Beyond ‘America for Americans’: Inside the Movement Culture of Antebellum Nativism,” in Immigrant America: European Ethnicity in the U.S., ed. Timothy Walch (New York: Garland, 1994), 7–28. 21. America’s Own, August 12, 1854. On the United American Mechanics, see Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know-­Nothings & the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 14; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 344; and Louis Dow Scisco, “Political Nativism in New York State” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1901), 65. 22. America’s Own, April 21, 1849, and August 4, 1849; “Right On!” and “Wide Awake!,” America’s Own, April 21, 1855. 23. Warren Jenkins was the eleventh mayor of Columbus, a Whig elected in 1836 who resigned in September 1837. Walcutt painted him and several family members, though not the City of Columbus’s mayoral portrait of Jenkins. See also Michael F. Holt, “The Antimasonic and Know-­Nothing Parties,” in History of U.S. Political Parties, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (New York: Chelsea House, 1973), 1:575–620. 24. The portraits named in this and the next paragraph derive from Walcutt’s manuscript “Pictures painted by William Walcutt,” n.d., n.p., attached to his manuscript “Notes of a Voyage from New York City, to London,” 1852; Walcutt papers, Archives of American Art. On Cass and popular sovereignty in the 1844 presidential election, see Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 319.

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25. William Walcutt’s 1841 portrait of President William Henry Harrison is probably the one now at Kentucky’s Old State Capitol in Frankfort, owned by the Kentucky Historical Society, a gift from the Whig State Central Committee of Ohio. The composition is based on Gilbert Stuart’s Lansdowne portrait of George Washington, another general (the artist included a battleground behind Harrison) turned president, and so a model for Harrison. On the election banner, see Ohio Repository, May 16, 1844, 1, clipping provided by David Walcutt. Thomas Hart Clay, Henry Clay’s son, became a Know-­Nothing, as did J. Scott Harrison, the son of William Henry Harrison. 26. Ross Barrett, Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-­ Century American Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 52. 27. Walcutt family oral history credits the painting to William, with a date of 1830. Because William was born April 28, 1818, that date seems impossible, but it does resemble his style in a somewhat similar signed and dated genre painting of 1850, The Losing Hand (The Gambler), auctioned August 2020. 28. The composition of Walcutt’s picture owes a debt to Wilkie, perhaps via John Lewis Krimmel’s Village Politicians (1819) and Village Tavern (1814). McRae engraved Wilkie’s Village Politicians for Walker’s American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum (1856), 534–38, with the accompanying commentary acknowledging Krimmel. See Richard R. John and Thomas C. Leonard, “Illusion of the Ordinary: John Lewis Krimmel’s Village Tavern and the Democratization of Public Life in the Early Republic,” Pennsylvania History 65 (Winter 1998): 87–96. 29. He is often referred to as Thomas Dow Jones, but a descendant says his middle name was David. See Samuel L. Leffingwell, Sketch of the Life and Labors of Thomas D. Jones, Sculptor (Columbus, Ohio: Columbus Printing, 1871). He also tried to invent a perpetual motion machine. See praise in the American Republican, July 27, 1844. 30. Tompkins Matteson in 1850 did a painting of the statesmen involved in the Compromise. His Union Portrait gathers them around a bust of George Washington. His composition gave more weight to Clay’s Democratic partners, especially John Calhoun, but also Lewis Cass, James Buchanan, Stephen Douglas, Samuel S. Houston, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Bell. Bell would run with Edward Everett as the Constitutional Union nominees for president in 1860; the party that served as a refuge for some former Know-­Nothings. It survives in an 1852 engraving by Henry Sadd at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 31. Herring was born in Massachusetts and was a member of E. H. Chapin’s Universalist Church. Chapin, a New Yorker, was a believer in ancestry (Anson Titus, “Edwin Hubbell Chapin,” Historical and Genealogical Register” [April 1884], 121–31), a lawyer who campaigned for Democrat Martin Van Buren, a temperance advocate, and editor of the Odd Fellows’ paper the Weekly Symbol. T. D. Jones did his portrait. 32. Proceedings of the Union Meeting at Castle Garden (New York: Union Safety committee, 1850). Jones did busts of James Cafferty, T. A. Richards, Jacob Dallas, and honorary members C. D. Stuart and Julia Dean. On Jones’s busts of Governor

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Salmon P. Chase, of which he said he sold more than 200 in Columbus, see the Columbus Gazette, August 6, 1858, and Jeffrey Weidman, Artists in Ohio, 1787–1900: A Biographical Dictionary (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2012), 467. Walcutt also painted Caleb Cushing Wright’s family. Wright used to partner with Asher B. Durand when the National Academy of Design president (1846–60) was still an engraver, and Durand was a friend of Charles Leupp, an art patron and manufacturer on the Union Safety Committee who was listed on the Clay medal case. Durand would support Walcutt’s American Artists’ Association and contribute pictures with a Sabbatarian thrust like Sunday Morning to the Odd-­ Fellows’ Offering for 1850. 33. Quoted in Jeffrey Weidman, Artists in Ohio, 1787–1900: A Biographical Dictionary (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2012), 899. See also William T. Martin, History of Franklin County (Columbus, Ohio: Follett, Foster, 1858), 331. The Walcutts owned a building at High and Town Streets, with studios, the museum, and a room for lectures, concerts, or theatricals, as well as a news depot. See also Claire Perry, The Great American Hall of Wonders: Art, Science and Invention in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2011). 34. John Greiner, a Mason, became editor of the Columbus Gazette in 1856, working with Alex Glenn, an Odd Fellow. One of the two visited David’s studio in the Walcutt building (Town and High Streets), Gazette, April 10, 1857, 3. J. N. Walcutt advertised the news depot in the building, with forty-­eight popular and cheap publications of the day, as well as books and notions, oil paintings and engravings, frames and toys. He advertised carrying Frank Leslie’s in English and German, the Star- ­Spangled Banner, the New York Sunday Dispatch, Brother Jonathan, and Albion, and said he was sole agent for the New York Sunday Mercury, which catered to firemen. D. B. Walcutt’s painting was Hocking Valley Picnic, 1855, Ohio History Connection. 35. William Walcutt, of New York, N.Y., Improvement in Sofa Bedsteads, U.S. Patent Office, Letters Patent No. 124,990, March 26, 1872, 1. On artists who pursued invention, see Laura Fecych Sprague and Justin Wolff, Rufus Porter’s Curious World: Art and Invention, (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press and Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2019), and Perry, Great American Hall of Wonders. 36. Walcutt family lore says that Walcutt had a salon, the Athenaeum, that met at his house in Mount Vernon, N.Y. There was an Athenaeum in Columbus, with one of Walcutt’s friends, lawyer Aaron F. Perry, on its board. British-­born portraitist Ferdinand Boyle was a student of Henry Inman, an artist beloved by firemen’s newspapers like America’s Own and the Sunday Mercury. He painted a portrait of the controversial Catholic bishop John Hughes in 1849 and portraits of fellow Sketch Club members Fosdick and Eliza Greatorex. He moved to St. Louis in 1855 or 1856 and joined the Union Army when war broke out. The Catalogue of the First Annual Exhibition of the Western Academy of Art (St. Louis: Printed at the Missouri Democrat, 1860) lists eight pictures by Walcutts, probably mostly by David. John Snedecor, of the eponymous New York gallery that gave J. A. Oertel a one-­man

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show in 1859, sent a great many works to this exhibition. Ohio artists John Beard, T. B. Read, T. S. Noble, and William Sonntag, the latter a friend of the Walcutts, also contributed. 37. Weidman, Artists in Ohio, 467–68. See also Leffingwell, Sketch of the Life and Labors of Thomas D. Jones. Fosdick would become an editor at the Democratic Cincinnati Enquirer. 38. “American Artists Association,” New-­Yorker, May 30, 1851, 2. 39. “Art and Artists,” Daguerreian Journal, November 1, 1850, 26. Samuel F. B. Morse’s role in introducing daguerreotypes to the U.S. meant that his students and suppliers—Mathew Brady, H. T. Anthony, the Scovill Co. of Connecticut—played a significant role in the profession and in advertising in early photography journals. Marshall Battani, “Organizational Fields, Cultural Fields and Art Worlds: The Early Effort to Make Photographs and Make Photographers in the 19th-­Century United States of America,” Media, Culture and Society 21, no. 5 (September 1999): 601–26, notes that daguerreotypists like Samuel Dwight Humphrey, editor of the Daguerreian Journal, were quite concerned about competition from factory daguerreotype production eroding prices and supported the creation of the American Daguerre Association in 1851, for artists—no members allowed who sold for low prices. Walcutt painted Humphrey’s portrait. 2. A Cooperative Model for Art

1. In 1849, the American Art-­Union paid $1,000 for Leutze’s Attainder of Strafford. The nativist-­tilting Evening Mirror (November 22, 1847, 3), which liked Leutze’s work, wished that he were an American painter. See also Mary Bartlett Cowdrey, The American Academy of Fine Arts and American Art-­Union, 1816–1852, 2 vols. (New York: New York Historical Society, 1953). On the Art-­Union, see especially Rachel Klein, Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth-­Century New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); Patricia Hills et al., Perfectly American: The Art-­Union & Its Artists (Tulsa, Okla.: Gilcrease Museum, 2011); Rachel Klein, “Art and Authority in Antebellum New York City: The Rise and Fall of the American Art-­Union,” Journal of American History (March 1995): 1,534–61; and Patricia Hills, “The American Art-­Union as Patron for Expansionist Ideology in the 1840s,” in Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850, ed. Andrew Hemingway and Will Vaughn (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 314–39. 2. T. Addison Richards, “The Painter’s Chorus,” Sun, February 21, 1849. Richards also wrote as “Flit” in his brother William’s Southern Literary Gazette and was secretary of the National Academy of Design. 3. “American Art-­Union Bulletins,” Republic, February 1851, 87. On Inness, see “Row in Rome,” New York Herald, May 17, 1852. On Vanderlyn, see, for example, Apelles, “Brief Notices,” American Eagle Magazine, June 7, 1847, 51. 4. “Brother Haight,” Republic, November 1852, 272; “Beautiful Penmanship,” Republic, November 1851, 232; and William E. Gienapp, “Nativism and the

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Republican Creation of a Majority in the North before the Civil War,” Journal of American History 72, no. 3 (December 1985): 529–59. 5. See Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 191–230, who focuses on fraternal associations after the Civil War. 6. See Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender and Fraternalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), as well as Anthony Oberschall, Social Conflict and Social Movements (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-­ Hall, 1973) and Cristina Bishop Klee, “The Happy Family and the Politics of Domesticity, 1840–1870” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 2003). 7. Political leader of the Know-­Nothing Party James W. Barker (he controlled the Order of the American Star, also known as the Wide Awakes) was an Odd Fellow, as was diplomat (consul to Genoa in 1842) and writer (on art, among other things) C. E. Lester. Eileen Muccino, “Irish Filibusters and Know-­Nothings in Cincinnati,” Ohio Valley History (Fall 2010): 20. 8. “The American Artists’ Association,” Sunday Mercury, March 16, 1851, 2. The free gallery was initially in Stoppani’s building, then, by 1852, in the Apollo Building. Both were popular locations for paying exhibitions. Thomas W. Whitley, an anti-­A rt-­Union artist with Ohio and nativist ties, Herald, December 22, 1951, 2, accused the Art-­Union of proscribing Ohio artists Walcutt, John and Godfrey Frankenstein, and James Beard. 9. “American Artists Association,” Republic, January 1852, 42. Walcutt’s “Painting— Its Origin and History,” Daguerreian Journal, March 1, 1850, 229–33, starts naming individual artists with the Greeks, for whom religion was the motive for their near-­ perfect art. Other cultures—Egypt, China, the Middle East—because they lacked an understanding of perspective (“falsely drawn”), are not credited with the invention of painting. 10. Herald, January 30, 1852, 2; “Art and Artists,” Sun, January 11 and 12, 1849. Those active in New York’s arts clubs may have been aware of the Artists’ Joint-­Stock Society in London, whose members (restricted to young, healthy practitioners of the fine arts) dined together and could blackball nominees. Their dues paid annuities to disabled members; The Regulations of the Artists’ Joint-­Stock Fund, established March 22nd, 1810 (London: J. Tyler, 1811). An Artists’ Fund Society formed in New York in 1859. 11. J. K. Fisher, a historical painter and anti-­Art-­Union activist who wrote in Henry Snelling’s Photographic Art Journal (which also published a biography of F. O. C. Darley and a piece by C. E. Lester on Mathew Brady), was critical of lotteries and prizes. He had been trying since 1844 to create a joint stock or public gallery, and though he initially participated in the meetings in 1850 that led to the AAA, he dropped out. “Domestic Items,” Home Journal, November 30, 1850. 12. Republic, July 1852, 43–44; “Artists’ Association,” New York Times, February 5, 1852. Tait was sketched by Walcutt, according to Isabel Walcutt’s copy of the “Index to a William Walcutt Sketchbook” (approx 100 pages, 9 x 12 inches, ca. 1850–74), a

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book with sketches of friends, family, and acquaintances mostly labeled, as well as works in progress, especially Musadora. All further references are to the copy of the Index, which is owned by David and Isabel Walcutt. I have not seen the original, which was once owned by Mrs. Virginia Lee of Cos Cob, Connecticut. 13. Thistlethwaite, “The Image of George Washington,” 310, reproduces a line drawing of Burns’s Washington Crowned as Figure 162. Tait’s portrayal of Washington was engraved, and he and James Cafferty worked together on a painting of Washington and his generals. 14. Sketch Club participants as compiled from newspaper reports, with members from Ohio starred: officers James H. Cafferty, Frederick A. Chapman, Vincent Colyer, Jacob Dallas, John C. Hagen, Thomas D. Jones,* T. A. Richards, Miss A. C. Thomson/Thompson, William Walcutt.* Members: Ash, Charles A. Barry, Charles F. Blauvelt, Jacob D. Blondell, Ferdinand Boyle, John Y. Brush, Frederic E. Church, Robert A. Clarke, Herr Cleanwork/Cleinwarth, John Cranch, Thomas S. Cummings, William Dunnel, Charles Elliott, Samuel Fanshawe, T. G. Gates, Sanford Gifford, Eliza Greatorex, William Hart, Herring, DeWitt Clinton Hitchcock,* Konrad Huber, A. (?) Isaacs, Joseph Kyle, Mary Frances Kyle (Dallas), Edward H. May, John McLenan,* Francis Panton, Petit (of Petit & Pheiffer Gallery), William Powell,* Alexander Ransom, William H. Redin, Rogers, Alexander Rutherford, John R. M. Skinner, Thomas H. Smith, Miss L. A. Sprague, J. B. Stearns, Arthur F. Tait/Tate, James Thom, C. A. Thompson, Jerome Thompson, A. Thorn, Francis Turk, Elias J. (?) Whitney, William W. Wotherspoon, James H. Wright (in 1851 he did Washington as a boy cutting down a cherry tree). Honorary members (literary mem­ bers, cannot vote): John Brougham (Lantern), Charles Burkhardt (Sunday Dispatch), Edwina Dean, Julia Dean (Mrs. Hayne),* DeForrest (Sunday Times), Mrs. C. J. (Matilda Pratt) Despard (sister of Eliza Greatorex), A. J. H. Duganne, John Dunn, Edmund Farrenc (Le Republicain), W. W. Fosdick (half-­brother to the Deans),* Charles Gayler,* R. D. Holmes (a lawyer), McKenzie, Cornelius Mathews, James F. Otis (Express, New Orleans Picayune), John Savage, Scherif/Scherf, Carlos D. Stuart, T. B. Thorpe, Underhill. Guests: Mrs. James Cafferty, Alice and Phoebe Cary,* Miss Clare, W. H. Coyle of Michigan, John Mitchel (Citizen), Charles Pope of the Broadway theater, Mrs. John Savage, Robert Sinclair(?). 15. Joy Peterson Heyrman, “ ‘Signature Drawings’: Social Networks and Collecting Practices in Antebellum Albums” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 2008). The Sun, January 13, 1849, a supporter of the Sketch Club, also noted the formation of a Humanitarian Society, of authors, artists, and literarily disposed gentlemen and ladies, to be a contributory club where each member presents something original at each meeting, a portfolio for discussion, to promote freer and nobler thought, to be drawn for by lots at the close of the meeting. 16. Artists who shared or had contiguous studio space (and often hosted) included J. Cafferty, J. Blondell, J. Brush, J. Wright, J. Kyle, C. Blauvelt, and J. Dallas. 17. New York Times, February 8, 1854. McLenan also worked at Vanity Fair and with Sketch Club members DeWitt Clinton Hitchcock and Jacob Dallas at Frank

NOTES TO PAGES 47–49

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Leslie’s, publications that typically had antislavery but Democratic agendas, and for Thomas Powell’s Chit-­Chat—Powell had earlier edited Young Sam. 18. Charles Gayler, “Anacreontic,” Evening Mirror, December 8, 1854, 1; Gayler, “A Night with the Sketch Club,” Evening Mirror, February 28, 1854, 1. A music publisher was said to have issued “Sketch Club Waltzes” in 1849, and the club contemplated publishing an anniversary volume of sketches. 19. Boyle and Tait, and perhaps others, were English; Wotherspoon and William Hart were Scottish émigrés; Huber, Pope, and Cleanwork were German, and Petit was Belgian. On Cafferty, see David Stewart Hull, James Henry Cafferty, N.A. (New York: New-­York Historical Society, 1986); on Greatorex, who studied with both Wotherspoon and Hart, see Katherine Manthorne, Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020). 20. Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 15–18. 21. Pat M. Ryan, “The Hibernian Experience: John Brougham’s Irish-­A merican Plays,” Melus 10, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 33–47. 22. Herald, March 24, 1855, 8. It also, April 24, 1860, found comic Blauvelt’s No News of 1860, of a man fallen asleep reading the Herald. As that paper in 1860 was pulling out the stops to warn readers against Republicans bringing civil war, Blauvelt’s intent was probably satirical. A James W. Blauvelt was an active member of Whitney’s OUA; R. L. Hinsdale, “Poetry of the Pencil: The Horrors of Slavery in Black and White,” Lantern, February 7, 1852, 46. 23. “Art Doings,” Evening Mirror, October 30, 1855; “Art News,” Copway’s American Indian, September 6, 1851, 3; “Charles F. Blauvelt,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 4, no. 4 (December 1860): 166–67. Brougham contributed an engraving of a newsboy protest in the Evening Mirror, August 25, 1845, while Morris was still editor, and was regularly praised. Brougham in 1849 contributed to the American Metropolitan Magazine, which also published Lester, Headley, Matteson, and Stearns, among others. 24. Savage, the most radical of the Irish nationalist members (Jacob Blondell, who shared a studio with Cafferty, was instructed [“Academy of Design,” Evening Mirror, May 16, 1853, 1], to subdue the fiery fervor of Savage’s rebellious stare in his 1853 portrait of the poet), went to art school in Dublin. William E. Robinson helped him get work at Greeley’s New York Tribune; he subsequently became a literary editor at Mitchel’s Citizen and then Meagher’s Irish News. He also contributed to the Democratic Review. He was friendly with Thomas Butler Gunn of the Lantern and published with Redfield, a house that fostered Young America and nativist authors. In 1857, he was editor in Washington, D.C., for the States before joining the army. His wife was Louise Reid, daughter of Samuel Chester Reid of the U.S. Navy; see Patrick McGrath, “Secular Power, Sectarian Politics: The American-­Born Irish Elite and Catholic Political Culture in Nineteenth-­Century New York,” Journal of American Ethnic History 38, no. 3 (Spring 2019): 36–75. 25. Joann P. Krieg, Whitman & the Irish (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 27–33, covers some of these contradictions in a literary context; see also

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Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986). 26. Emanuel Leutze is often given credit and may have been a driving force. But Vincent Colyer was an officer of the New York Sketch Club, and he organized and distributed the artists’ letter to Mayor Ambrose Kingsland proposing artists help with Kossuth’s reception in New York. Sketch Club signatories included James H. Cafferty, T. Addison Richards, William Walcutt, Joseph Kyle, Sanford R. Gifford, and Charles Blauvelt. Emanuel Leutze and T. P. Rossiter also signed, as did artists associated with transcendentalism, like Thomas Hicks, John Kensett, and C. P. Cranch (his brother John was in the Sketch Club), as well as R. W. Hubbard, Robt. J. Rayner, and Louis Lang. The letter was widely published—as for example, in the New York Times, November 18, 1851, and the Dollar Magazine, December 1851, 283. 27. Edmund Farrenc, Carlotina and the Sanfedesti, or, A Night with the Jesuits at Rome (New York: John S. Taylor, 1853). 28. “Rome,” in Ariel (New York: Bunce and Brother, 1855), 97, though Dallas’s illustrations were tied to Fosdick’s fairy poems in the volume. Oliver Bell Bunce edited the Weekly Yankee in 1849, with Odd Fellow Park Benjamin and G. G. Foster, the latter of whom took up nativist views. Jacob Dallas worked at T. W. Strong’s American Illustrated News and Yankee-Notions, and Frank Leslie’s; after Dallas’s premature death, Leslie hired his widow and fellow Sketch Club member, Mary Kyle Dallas, as a writer for his short-­lived and somewhat nativist-­named Stars and Stripes of 1859. Dallas also illustrated H. M. Rulison’s anti-­Catholic Mysteries and Miseries of the Queen City (Cincinnati: E. Mendenhall, 1855). Rulison himself published The True American’s Textbook in 1855. 29. The Odd Fellows barred Blacks in 1842, American Indians in 1847, mixed race in 1849, and Chinese in 1857. The Red Men were whites only; George Emery and J. C. Herbert Emery, A Young Man’s Benefit: The Independent Order of Odd-­Fellows and Sickness Insurance in the United States and Canada, 1860-­1929 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1999), 26–27. 30. See Jean Gould Hales, “Co-­laborers in the Cause”: Women in the Antebellum Nativist Movement,” Civil War History 25, no. 2 (June 1979): 119–38. 31. Header, Golden Rule, January 3, 1846, and Frontispiece, Republic, January 1851. 32. William Gerdts, Jr., Painting and Sculpture in New Jersey (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1964), 96, publishes an 1850 sketch for it, and a line drawing appeared in Key to and Description of “The Last Judgment,” in A Scriptural Painting by Rembrandt Lockwood (Newark, N.J.: W. H. Tinson, 1854). The pamphlet was printed in English, German, French, and Spanish, suggesting its global evangelical message. 33. Yale-­educated Irish lawyer William E. Robinson’s pseudonym at the New York Tribune was Richelieu; he had a Customs House job under Whig Zachary Taylor. In attendance at the opening were, in addition to Robinson and Walcutt, Rev. Dr. Schroeder (Sunday Schools), Col. Morris R. Hamilton (True American), John P. Jackson, Thomas Clerke (Judge of Supreme Court), and Hon. A. N. Bradford, Secretary; “Lockwood’s Last Judgment,” America’s Own, September 16,

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1854; Express, September 14, 1854. An S. Lockwood wrote for the Odd-­Fellows’ Offering. 34. Englishman George Rogers commissioned Burns to portray Washington Crowned by Equality, Fraternity and Liberty, surrounded by international liberators, and wrote the Explanation of the Painting (New York: Cameron’s Steam Presses, 1850). Rogers then published an epic poem, My Adopted Country (New York: J. C. Riker, 1851), 14, in which he praised the U.S. as “happy land, / A bond of union, sublime and grand, / In holy brotherhood, a compact band!” created by a great and happy race of patriot fathers and virtuous matrons. He advocated for the new republican union eventually to extend to all of Europe. Washington and the angels of equality, fraternity, and liberty were also the subjects of a Martin F. Tupper poem in the Evening Mirror, October 11, 1848. 35. W, “American Fine Arts: Rembrandt Lockwood’s Painting of the Last Judgment,” Republic (April 1852), 185–86; “Lockwood’s Last Judgment,” Sunday Dispatch, April 30, 1854, 2. Burkhardt was an editor at the paper. 36. Jessica Routhier, “Fellow Journeyers: Walt Whitman and Jesse Talbot; Painting, Poetry and Puffery in 1850s New York,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 38, no. 1 (Summer 2020): 37n85, identifies Samuel Hanson Cox as speaking at the painting’s 1862 exhibition in Brooklyn. On Cox, see Dwyn Mecklin Mounger, “Samuel Hanson Cox: Anti-­Catholic, Anti-­A nglican, Anti-­Congregational Ecumenist,” Journal of Presbyterian History 55, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 347–61. 37. “Lockwood’s Last Judgment,” Evening Mirror, September 22, 1854. On the biblical races, see Gail Husch, Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid-­ Nineteenth-­Century Painting (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000), 96–104; Independent, September 21, 1854. Clarence Cook, who also wrote for the Independent, however, in the Evening Post, October 21, 1854, destroyed the painting’s claims to aesthetic merit. 38. “Lockwood’s New York Academy of Art,” America’s Own, May 19, 1855. Walcutt did only a few religious pictures, but his (lost) paintings of the church triumphant and the church militant, angels, and battles, Dispatch, April 16, 1848, perhaps had an allegorical structure that resembled Lockwood’s. 3. Native Americans and the West

1. See Luke Ritter, Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis: Political Nativism in the Antebellum West (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). 2. William Walcutt, “Joel Wetsel: A Story of the Backwoods,” Republic, October 1852, 196–97, reprinted in Gleason’s 7, no. 26 (June 30, 1866): 403. Walcutt also planned to depict Joel Wetsel fishing, in a battle, and shooting at a mark, only the last of which Walcutt notes (“Pictures painted by William Walcutt,” manuscript attached to “Notes of a Voyage from New York City”) as being published. Possibly it was this one for the Odd Fellows: “Wetzel, the Indian Hunter,” American Odd-­ Fellows’ Museum (New York: Edward Walker, 1856), 282–84 (also 1853, 260–63). See

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NOTES TO PAGES 56–59

also Cecil B. Hartley, Life and Adventures of Lewis Wetzel, The Virginia Ranger (Philadelphia: G. G. Evans, 1859); Walcutt, “Thoughts on Going to My Native Home,” Republic, January 1852, 29. 3. Doyle Leo Buhler, “Capturing the Game: The Artist-­Sportsman and Early Animal Conservation in American Hunting Imagery, 1830s–1890s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 2011), 141, and throughout, points to the changing relationship between the elite “sportsman” and the rough backwoodsman, both of whom, unlike the market-­oriented hunter, hunt for pleasure, and so may be conservation-­minded. 4. William Walcutt, “Recollections of the Last War, No. 2, Incidents in the Battle of New-­Orleans,” Republic, January 1852, 21–22. 5. Walcutt, manuscript of “Journal of a Voyage from New York City to London,” 1852, transcribed by David Walcutt, 41–43, 21. 6. Walcutt, “Journal of a Voyage from New York City to London,” 22, 6, 83; “Notes made during the Return Voyage,” transcribed by David Walcutt, 98–100, 102; Archives of American Art. 7. Walcutt painted actor Dan Marble in 1849: “Pictures Painted by William Walcutt,” manuscript attached to “Notes of a Voyage from New York City to London,” n.p. Dan Marble’s biographer, Falconbridge (Jonathan F. Kelley), also contributed western tales to Whitney’s Republic and the Spirit of the Times, and eventually had his own nativist paper in Cincinnati. 8. Laura Lee Meixner, “Jean-­François Millet: His American Students and Influences” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1979), 71–72, notes that Goupil rejected Millet’s drawings. See also De Cost Smith, “Jean Francois Millet’s Drawings of American Indians,” Century Magazine 80, no. 1, May 1910, 78–84. 9. N. Currier, Mazeppa, 1846, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Menken took on the nearly nude role in 1861 in New York, about the time she had a brief affair with Artemus Ward, a friend of Walcutt’s who was then editing Vanity Fair. On Menken and Ward, see Justin Martin, Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians (New York: Hachette, 2014), 145–47. 10. Hartley, Life and Adventures of Lewis Wetzel, 126–47. Henry Howe, Howe’s Historical Collections of Ohio (Cincinnati: Derby, Bradley, 1847), was the source for Wetzel relied on by the Odd-­Fellows, and also covers Kenton’s ride: 306–11. 11. On Cooper, Diary of Donn Piatt, May 29 and June 2, 1840, Piatt Papers, Mac-­ O-­Cheek Castle. Piatt’s speech of 1867 is quoted at length in Charles Grant Miller, Donn Piatt: His Work and His Ways (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1893), 196–201. The artist Piatt had in mind for the statue was J. Q. A. Ward, from Urbana, Ohio, a neighboring town to the Piatts, who had designed a pair of statues contrasting Kenton with a crouching anonymous Indian. Miller, who wrote Piatt’s first biography, was Piatt’s private secretary and would, after leaving his employ, edit the Cleveland Plain Dealer, for which Piatt wrote after the Civil War. Miller much later wrote Treason to American Tradition (Los Angeles: Sons of the Revolution, 1922), on pro-­British historians misrepresenting the American Revolution and War of 1812,

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including page 35, treasonous dismissals of the pulling down of the statue of George III as thoughtless people doing foolish things (rather than noble acts). 12. Christina Pelenski, “Delacroix’s Mazeppa Oil Painting Rediscovered,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 7 (1983): 507–19, is one of only a few scholars to write on these paintings in English. Thomas M. Prymak, “The Cossack Hetman: Ivan Mazepa in History and Legend from Peter to Pushkin,” Historian (2014): 237–77, also discusses visual representation. 13. A. E. Costello, Our Firemen: The History of the New York Fire Departments from 1609–1887, Chapter 38, Part IV, transcribed by Holice B. Young, html by Debbie Axtman, made available in the New York History & Genealogy Book Archive, in conjunction with New York Roots, at http://www.newyorkroots.org/bookarchive/ historyofnyfiredepartments/. Albert Moriarty’s Mazeppa panel is at the Museum of the City of New York, and is illustrated in William Gerdts, The Great American Nude (New York: Praeger, 1974), 67. 14. Pelenski, “Delacroix’s Mazeppa Oil Painting Rediscovered,” 507–19. 15. See Lucy Barnes, “A Crowded Stage: The Legitimate Borrowings of Henry Milner’s Mazeppa,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 42, no. 1 (2015): 50–65. 16. Healy’s portrait of Clay was commissioned by Louis Philippe and entered the royal collection in 1847. Two versions of Walcutt’s painting may have existed. The Kentucky Historical Society dates Simon Kenton’s Ride to 1859, a period when Walcutt spent time in Cincinnati, and he may have painted a version at that time. See “Department of Clippings,” Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society 17, no. 51 (September 1919): 86. A payment of $100 to Mrs. David B. Walcutt for the Kentucky Historical Society’s purchase of a painting of Simon Kenton’s Death-­ Ride was recorded in the Kentucky General Assembly, on January 6, 1911: Journal of the House of Representatives (Frankfort: Kentucky State Journal, 1912), 1:341. 17. See for example, Richard Francaviglia, Go East, Young Man: Imagining the American West as the Orient (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2011). 18. Louise Piatt, Bell Smith Abroad (New York: J. C. Derby, 1854), 231–32. 19. “Art and Artists,” Sun, January 1, 1849. In Cleveland, one of the Sketch Club subjects was “The Pioneers.” 20. The engraving, based on Matteson’s 1847 painting (New York Historical Society), first appeared in the Odd-­Fellows’ Offering for 1848, ed. James Ridgely and Paschal Donaldson (New York: Edward Walker, 1847), with two poems, one by well-­ known poet and editor Charles Fenno Hoffman (“Last of the Race”) and one by Franklin J. Ottarson. Ottarson’s “The Last of Their Race” was the only poem included with the engraving in the American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum (New York: Edward Walker, 1856), 362–65. The devout Ottarson edited for the Sunday Dispatch and the New York Tribune, both liberal, William Seward Whig papers, and his poem criticizes the pale-­ face as a robber and wolf who practiced foul intrigue and force. 21. Walcutt, “Joel Wetsel,” 196; “The First Ship,” title page, in Odd-­Fellows’ Offering for 1851 (New York: Edward Walker, 1850).

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NOTES TO PAGES 65–69

22. “Art Matters,” Express, November 9, 1853. Walcutt also painted portraits of Townsend and his wife. 23. S. P. Townsend, Our National Finances, No. 11 (New York: Baker & Godwin, 1865), 39, 52. The tariff and paper money, like the vision of a Protestant U.S., were formerly Whig Party principles. 24. Walcutt, “Stories of the Far West,” manuscript, following “Notes of a Voyage from New York City to London.” 25. F. O. C. Darley led the way with “Sports in America—Shooting the Thanksgiving Turkey,” for the Illustrated London News, November 19, 1858. Julian Scott, Harper’s Weekly, January 17, 1874, 60, illustrated an article condemning the unsportsmanlike shoots. John W. Ehninger’s 1879 Turkey Shoot (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), though seemingly set in contemporary upstate New York, may still reflect Cooper’s story. Ehninger, a Columbia College graduate, was also an illustrator, most often of literature set in the eighteenth century; his painting’s interested African American man in the foreground and an approaching woman in the background are not standard features in sporting illustrations. 26. His biblical name contrasts with the only other African American in the novel, the slave Agamemnon—the first person the reader meets. Leatherstocking’s valuable and heroic dog, Hector, is the only other character with a Greek name. Agamemnon was a Greek victor at Troy, and Hector was killed at Troy; as in the Pioneers, Agamemnon’s owner triumphs over Leatherstocking. 27. Carol Clark, “Haunted Paintings in the World of Print: Charles Deas,” Bibliographical Society of America 105, no. 4 (2011): 421–38; see also Clark, Charles Deas and 1840s America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). Deas’s tavern sign, Cakes and Beer, evokes a German owner; in Cooper, an Irish couple own the Bold Dragoon, while a rival Coffee House is owned by a Yankee corporate firm. Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 97, 139, observes that the Young America clique around Evert Duyckinck, a Knickerbocker (old New Yorker—a “Dutchman”) boasted of their love for “cakes and ale” and included Deas among the comic artists defining American art. 28. On the equation of Native Americans with the wild turkey, see Janet Siskind, “The Invention of Thanksgiving: A Ritual of American Nationality,” Critique of Anthropology 12, no. 2 (1992): 167–91, and Luanne K. Roth, “Talking Turkey: Visual Media and the Unraveling of Thanksgiving” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 2010). 29. The Smithsonian’s painting came from an Ohio donor, suggesting it might be the non-­Townsend version. 30. James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (New York: Airmont, 1964), 190–92. See the excellent discussion of the backwoodsman in Buhler, “Capturing the Game,” 12–13, 66–72. 31. William Walcutt, “Recollections of the Last War, No. 2, Incidents in the Battle of New-­Orleans,” Republic, January 1852, 21–22.

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32. Cooper, Pioneers, 33–36, 47–48. 33. Thomas S. Gladsky, “James Fenimore Cooper and American Nativism,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1994): 49, 50. 34. Charles L. Elliott’s portrait of Cooper hung in 1860 in the Williams and Stevens gallery, promoting a new edition of Cooper’s work illustrated by F. O. C. Darley; Elliott’s friendship with Lewis Clark, editor of the Knickerbocker, was commemorated by New York Sketch Club member J. B. Stearns, who painted them fishing together. 35. Dale T. Knobel, “Know-­Nothings and Indians: Strange Bedfellows?” Western Historical Quarterly 15, no. 2 (April 1984): 176. 36. Jason Rockwood Orton, Campfires of the Red Men (New York: J. C. Derby, 1855), title page. 37. Orton, Campfires, 364–67. 38. Orton moved to New York in 1850 (The American Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1867 [New York: D. Appleton, 1868], 7:554), edited the New-­York Weekly Review (from 1850 to 1873) and a music journal, and contributed to the journal Musical World, which merged with Richard Storrs Willis’s Musical Times in 1852, becoming the Musical World and New York Musical Times. 39. Orton, Campfires, 237–38, 323–24. The deeply religious Cole painted two versions of the series, one shown in New York’s National Academy of Design in 1840 and now at the Munson-­Williams-­Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York; the second one completed in 1842 and now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. By the mid-­1850s when Orton was writing, thanks to the American Art-­Union, engravings of the series by James Smillie were widely available. 4. Fairies, Allegory, and the Spiritualists

1. New York Evangelist, November 30, 1854, 191; Hugh Davis, “The New York Evangelist, New School Presbyterians and Slavery, 1837–1857,” American Presbyterians 68, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 14–23; America’s Own, July 15, 1854. The Reverend Samuel Cox, who spoke about Jesse Talbot’s Sons of Noah, published dark critiques of the “miserable popish hierarchy” as anti-­A merican in the Evangelist in 1842 and 1843 as part of his efforts to create a united Protestant America; Dwyn Mecklin Mounger, “Samuel Hanson Cox: Anti-­Catholic, Anti-­Anglican, Anti-­Congregational Ecumenist,” Journal of Presbyterian History 55, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 351. Cox was, like Walcutt’s father-­in-­law, Burchard, a leader in the effort to democratize the Presbyterian Church in New York City and was active in the church’s antislavery movement, though by the 1850s he had become a defender of compromise with the South; Charles C. Cole Jr., “The Free Church Movement in New York City,” New York History 34, no. 3 (July 1953): 284–97. 2. Index to a William Walcutt Sketchbook, Collection of David Walcutt; Walcutt, French Sketchbook, 1852–54, Walcutt Papers, Archives of American Art; Charles Wilkins Webber, “Sam:” Or the History of Mystery (Cincinnati: H. M. Rulison, 1855);

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Dexter A. Hawkins, The Anglo-­Saxon Race: Its History, Character and Destiny (New York: Printed by Nelson & Phillips, 1875). On the American Tract Society and similar organizations, see John R. Bodo, The Protestant Clergy and Public Issues, 1812–1848 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954). Talbot was also admired in the nativist American Republican, May 20, 1844. 3. Herald, February 3, 1846. Lyon wrote frequently for the Herald, and the Herald defended Lester, loved his biography of Sam Houston, devoted the whole front page of the paper in 1849 to the new Odd Fellows building downtown and Lester’s speech for it, and approved of Lester’s collaboration with G. G. Foster (a nativist and workingmen’s author formerly at the Tribune) on a new penny paper, Herald of the Union. 4. Christian Advocate, September 5, 1850. 5. Derek Hudson, Martin Tupper, His Rise and Fall (London: Constable, 1949), 39, 108. 6. Hudson, Martin Tupper, 69, 127; see also Joseph L. Coulombe, “To Destroy the Teacher”: Whitman and Martin Farquhar Tupper’s 1851 Trip to America,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 13, no. 4 (1996): 199–209; Matt Cohen, “Martin Tupper, Walt Whitman, and the Early Reviews of Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 16, no. 1 (1998): 23–31; and “Fine Arts,” Sunday Dispatch, November 12, 1848. On the Anglo-­A merican alliance, see Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 14–27. 7. On Greeley, see, for example, Adam Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s “New-­York Tribune”: Civil War-­Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), and Charles Colbert, Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), which sets spiritualism’s influence on art as a counter to industrialization (as Fourierism was, too). 8. The Fourth Universalist Society bought the Church of Divine Unity on Broadway in 1852; Walcutt had a studio there, according to the Sunday Dispatch, April 16, 1848. E. H. Chapin edited the Weekly Symbol in opposition to the more Southern-­sympathizing New York Golden Rule before Democrat F. A. Durivage (known as the “Old ’Un” in his contributions to the Spirit of the Times; he also wrote for Morris’s Mirror and Clark’s Knickerbocker) took over from 1846 to 1847: “The Odd Fellow Periodical Press,” American Odd Fellow, January 1862, 16–21. Authors in the Symbol included A. J. H. Duganne and Ned Buntline. 9. Other musicians in Walcutt’s records include composer Herrman Saroni, editor of Saroni’s Musical Times, pianist William Wood, James H. Aislman, secretary of the Harmonic Society, and Van Der Weyde, M.D., organist at the First Dutch Reformed Church. Wetmore in 1839 also did music for Odd Fellow, poet, and editor Park Benjamin, who supported the temperance movement and was an admirer of Jesse Talbot. 10. William J. Wetmore, I May Not Meet Thee (New York: T. S. Berry, 1853). 11. William J. Wetmore, music, George P. Morris, lyrics, The Willow at the Well (New York: Millets Music Saloon, 1847); William J. Wetmore, Uncle Sam’s Invitation to the World (New York: Millets Music Saloon, 1852).

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12. Given the resonance of that title and its account of wild birds singing in a grove and death (of a father), with Brooklyn editor Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, it’s interesting that Whitman gave Orton (a former newspaper colleague) a copy of his 1855 Leaves of Grass and briefly attended Harris’s church in Brooklyn. Perhaps he knew Wetmore’s song. 13. “Fine Arts: New Statuary,” New York Times, January 8, 1866, describes Walcutt’s statuette of the actress Miss Lacoste in her role of a martyred Roman daughter; clipping courtesy of David Walcutt. Anna Lacoste was a protegée of Isaac C. Pray, who in 1855 wrote a biography of the controversial founder of the Unionist New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett. Pray, a poet, had been a drama critic for the nativist Express and the Sunday Morning News, the latter a conservative Whig paper edited for a time by United Americans’ founder Thomas R. Whitney. 14. C. D. Stuart, “The Age,” American People’s Journal, January 1850, 35–36. 15. S. B. Brittan, “Carlos D. Stuart,” American People’s Journal, January 1850, 25–30. 16. A. J. H. Duganne, Knights of the Seal (Philadelphia: Colon and Adriance, 1845). According to the New York Express and the Sunday Dispatch, Stuart worked at the Daily News before becoming literary manager of the Illustrated News late in 1860. In 1859, Duganne and Headley were working at the Daily News. Duganne served in the same session of the New York Assembly as Matteson. 17. Sunday Dispatch, October 26, 1856; American People’s Journal, January 1850, 1, and April 1849, 251. 18. Fosdick presented it at a meeting of one of Law’s Live Oak Clubs in New York that included a presentation by Know-­Nothing political leader and temperance advocate James W. Barker; Evening Mirror, January 11, 1856. 19. Copy of Agnes Leeds’s Memory Album, Collection of David Walcutt. Donn Piatt’s gift to Ella Kirby of John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing: In Three Letters to Beginners (New York: Wiley & Halsted, 1857) followed his gift to her of a sketchbook, which had drawings in it by William and David B. Walcutt; Piatt papers, Mac-­A-­ Cheek Castle. 20. William Walcutt, “The Artists and the Smallpox,” Republic, August 1852, 94; Charles Colbert, “ ‘Razors and Brains’: Asher B. Durand and the Paradigm of Nature,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1992): 270. Durand was a founder of the National Academy of Design, which admitted women as honorary members. 21. David A. Day, “The New York Musical World (1852–1860),” Répertoire international de la presse musicale RIPM Consortium, Ltd., 1993, www.ripm.org, finds Morand’s name appearing on a title page from April 14, 1855, through January 2, 1858. The merger with the Musical Times occurred between 1852 and 1854. The primary editor throughout the journal’s life was Richard Storrs Willis, the Yale-­educated brother of Nathaniel P. Willis, the longtime coeditor with George P. Morris of several newspapers. William J. Wetmore was published in the journal. Morand’s Brooklyn studio was at 297 Fulton Street, corner of Johnson. On Saroni, see David Francis Urrows, “Herrman S. Saroni (ca. 1824–1900) and the “first” American Operetta,” Bulletin of the Society for American Music 34, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 9–11.

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22. Copy of Agnes Leeds’s Memory Album; Reverend Thomas L. Harris, “The Authority of the Ideal,” American People’s Journal, January 1850, 17. 23. J. C. Hagen, “Twilight Musings,” Crayon, April 4, 1855, 214. William Stillman, one of the Crayon’s editors, was a Ruskin adherent and a follower of Kossuth. FHG, “A Snow Scene,” American People’s Journal, March 1849, 159; John C. Hagen, “The Old Pine Tree with Branches Bare,” Foot-­Prints of Truth or Voice of Humanity (New York: Cornish, Lamport, 1853), 80–81. 24. Fanny Green, “The First Snow Storm,” and John McRae after Charles Blauvelt, “The First Snow-­Storm,” in American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum (New York: Edward Walker, 1856), 423, 424; Blauvelt’s picture is perhaps the same as his Snow-­ Balling purchased by the American Art-­Union. 25. John Cole Hagen, Foot-­Prints of Truth, or Voice of Humanity (New York: Cornish, Lamport, 1853); Nancy Stula, Barbara Novak, and David Miller Robinson, At Home and Abroad: The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearce Cranch (1813–1892) (New London, Conn.: Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 2007). 26. Diary of Donn Piatt, August 16, 1843, Piatt Papers, Mac-­A-­Cheek Castle. Piatt was a subscriber to L. G. Clark’s Knickerbocker magazine, which he admired greatly during a period when he was reading the English romantic poets. He had a skeptical but tolerant view of spiritualism, as per his undated (but probably post–Civil War) manuscript “Science and Spiritualism”; Piatt papers, Mac-­A-­Cheek Castle. 27. On the connection between Fourierism and art associations, see Wendy Katz, Humbug! (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 124–55. Piatt, an admirer of land reformer and advocate of a Christian republic Henry George, quoted in Peter Bridges, Donn Piatt: Gadfly of the Gilded Age (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2012), 130, from an 1865 speech in Ford’s Theater in Washington to a workingmen’s assembly. 28. John Cole Hagen, Ballads of the Revolution (New York: G. Munro, 1866); Ethiop (William J. Wilson), “Afric American Picture Gallery,” Anglo-­African Magazine (the series ran from February to April, June to August, and October, 1859); “What We Should Like to See,” Asmonean, July 22, 1853. The writer is critical of Protestant historical painters like Carl Friedrich Lessing and Peter von Cornelius. 29. “Foot-­Prints of Truth,” Christian Inquirer, November 6, 1852, 2. Hagen’s “Prayer of the Lost One” had appeared in the weekly in 1850. He wrote at least twenty-­four poems for the publication from 1850 to 1863, which had a tolerant view of spiritualism; WGH, “The Spiritual Philosophy,” Christian Inquirer, July 31, 1852, 2; “Hagen’s Footprints of Truth,” Literary World, November 6, 1852, 296. 30. C. P. Cranch, “The Graphic Muse,” in Hagen, Foot-­Prints, after 64. 31. See John Wennersten, “A Reformer’s Odyssey: The Public Career of Parke Godwin of the New York Evening Post, 1837–1870” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1970). Like Walcutt, Godwin’s grandfather and father fought in 1776 and 1812, and Godwin spent time in Kentucky before moving to New York. A Free Soiler and Fourierist, he consulted spiritualists. 32. Nicola Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-­Century Art and Literature (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Christopher P. Cranch wrote and

NOTES TO PAGES 92–94

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illustrated The Last of the Huggermuggers: A Giant Story (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1856), with a sequel the following year. N. P. Willis also had one: “Prospectus,” Youth’s Companion, April 16, 1827, 1. Thanks to Laura White for bringing these to my attention. 33. Harper’s Fairy Book, illustrated by J. A. Adams (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836). Golden Rule, February 21, 1846. On early fairy books, including Cranch, see Brian Attebery, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1980), 1–82. 34. Richard Henry Stoddard, Adventures in Fairy-­Land (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1853); Cornelius Mathews, Indian Fairy Book (New York: Mason Brothers, 1855). See Jessica Skwire Routhier, Kevin Avery, and Thomas Hardiman, The Painters’ Panorama: Narrative, Art and Faith in the Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2015). On the Catholic response to John Bunyan’s allegory, see the Freeman’s Journal, February 2 and February 16, 1850. Rather than progress, the Freeman’s Journal saw Moloch as the “spirit of the age.” 35. William Fosdick, Ariel, and Other Poems (New York: Bunce & Brother, 1855). Dallas became something of a fairy specialist, illustrating Spencer Wallace Cone’s Fairies in America (New York: Pudney & Russell, 1859), the Child’s Book of Fairy Tales (Philadelphia: G. G. Evans, 1860), and Famous Fairy Tales for Little Folks (New York: James Miller, 1861). Cone, a playwright, was the son of a Virginia Baptist minister, and edited Parker’s Journal in New York in 1850–51. 36. Not entirely comprehensive (a difficult task) lists of illustrators can be found in Sidney Huttner and Elizabeth Huttner, A Register of Artists, Engravers, Booksellers, Bookbinders, Printers & Publishers in New York City, 1821–1842 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1993); Sinclair Hamilton, Early American Book Illustrators and Wood Engravers, 1670–1870 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958); and David Tatham, Prints and Printmakers of New York State, 1825–1840 (Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 1986). See also the discussions in Gerald Ward, ed., The American Illustrated Book in the Nineteenth Century (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Museum, 1987); Robert Gross and Mary Kelley, eds., An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Frank Weitenkampf, American Graphic Art (New York: Macmillan, 1924). 37. Charles Browne (city editor), Plain Dealer, March 9, 1860, 2. 38. C. D. Stuart, “The Phase of the Age,” American People’s Journal, January 1850, 34–36. 39. Charles Burkhardt, Fairy Tales of Many Nations (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1850). In an 1874 edition issued by James Miller, William Howland and the Orr brothers also contributed illustrations and engravings; perhaps Howland was responsible as well for the original frontispiece and/or the fairy endpieces, which resemble his later designs for the volume. 40. Jennifer Schacker, National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-­Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 2–5. On contrast as a principle in genre painting, see, for example, Elizabeth Johns,

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American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). 41. “Fairy Tales and Legends,” Holden’s Dollar Magazine, December 1848, 759–60. 42. Gunn was also friendly with Tudor Horton, Thomas Picton (an editor and OUA member), and Lossing. See “Thomas Butler Gunn Diaries, 1849–1863,” Missouri Historical Society. On Darley as part of the Young America circle around Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews, see Widmer, Young America, 138; and for Darley’s assimilationist view of Catholics, see David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 98–99. 43. William Henry Brooke (1772–1860) was an antislavery, Irish nationalist, Methodist illustrator known for his “clear, spirited, and delicate outlines,” including of fairies in books of folklore, as well as a satirist (“Obituary—William Henry Brooke,” Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1860, 410–11). He also painted a portrait of social reformer Robert Owen (1834, National Portrait Gallery, London). On the mix of comic grotesque and romantically graceful in the 1826 edition of Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, see Schacker, National Dreams, 64–77. 44. T. B. Thorpe, The Mysteries of the Backwoods (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1846). The Buntline/Darley collaboration began June 1859; Darley was still illustrating for the New York Sunday Mercury in 1861; John Vincent (Jedediah Vincent Huntington), The Pretty Plate: A Christmas Juvenile (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1852); George Copway, The Life and Travels of Kah-­ge-­ga-­gah-­bowh (Albany: Weed and Parsons, 1847); and Motley Manners (A. J. H. Duganne), “A Mirror for Authors,” Holden’s Dollar Magazine, January 1849, 133. See also John E. Reilly, “Poe in Pillory: An Early Version of a Satire by A. J. H. Duganne,” Poe Studies 6, no. 1 (June 1973): 9–12; and George Pope Morris, Poems (New York: Scribner, 1853). 45. Ilene Susan Fort, “High Art and the American Experience: The Career of Thomas Pritchard Rossiter” (M.A. Thesis, Queens College, City University of New York, 1975). On Rossiter’s millennialist pictures, see Gail Husch’s wonderful Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid-­Nineteenth-­Century Painting (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000), 81–106. Godwin and Whitley were both closely connected to actor Edwin Forrest. 46. Bruce Weber, Every Kind of a Painter: The Art of Thomas Prichard Rossiter, 1818–1871 (Hudson Valley, N.Y.: Boscobel House and Gardens, 2015). 47. “Editor’s Table—National Academy of Design,” Knickerbocker 27, June 1846, 556–57. On domesticity and fraternalism, see Mary Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender and Fraternalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 178–210. On the YMCA, see Weber, Every Kind of a Painter, and Richard J. Koke and Elaine Andrews, American Landscape and Genre Paintings in the New York Historical Society (New York: New York Historical Society, 1982), 3:113–14. 48. Fort, “High Art and the American Experience,” notes his friendship with artist James de Veaux of South Carolina, who was one of the artists featured in C. E.

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Lester’s Artists of America (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1846), among considerably more famous ones like Washington Allston, John Trumbull, Benjamin West, and Gilbert Stuart. 49. Liberty Freeing the Shackles of Slavery and Sheltering the Emigrant, 1863, 12 × 16 inches, sold at auction Feb. 24, 2008; Thomas P. Rossiter and Louis Mignot, Washington and Lafayette at Mount Vernon, 1784, 1859, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Thistlethwaite, “The Image of George Washington,” 136–44. 50. His patron James Brewster, a descendant of William Brewster, was memorialized by an editor of the New Haven Palladium, a Know-­Nothing organ: James F. Babcock, Address upon the Life and Character of James Brewster (New Haven, Conn.: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, printers, 1867). Rossiter’s very wealthy in-­laws the Parmlys were descended from Connecticut Puritans and were involved in the antislavery and temperance movements; Carlos D. Stuart dedicated Ianthe, and Other Poems (New York: C. L. Stickney, 1843), to them. 51. Hagen, Foot-­Prints, 64–68. 52. Multiple engravers worked on the book and probably contributed designs, as well: J. W. Orr, W. Howland, Richardson, I. A., and Bobbett and Edmonds. 53. Rossiter, initial, in Godwin, Vala (New York: George P. Putnam, 1851); Gustavus Stadler, Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics of Genius in the United States, 1840–1890 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 33–72. Leutze’s Landing of the Northmen (1846, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf), a successor to his Columbus paintings, was described at the time as “proud, blooming, blond men in lofty eagle helmets stride ashore, bearing a girlish figure on their shoulders . . . a mighty breed of men and a mighty land meet for the first time”; quoted in Martin Gammon, Deaccessioning and Its Discontents (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018), 148. 54. Stadler, Troubling Minds, 44–50, 56. See also Patricia Roylance, “Northmen and Native Americans: The Politics of Landscape in the Age of Longfellow,” New England Quarterly 80, no. 3 (September 2007): 435–58. 55. Stadler, Troubling Minds, 37, 50–54. 56. Tamarkin, Anglophilia, 180–242. 5. The Young Americans at Home and Abroad

1. Cornelius Mathews, Chanticleer: A Thanksgiving Story (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1853); Mathews is quoted in Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 60. See also Allen F. Stein, Cornelius Mathews (New York: Twayne, 1974). Darley also did the frontispiece for Mathews’s Moneypenny, or, The Heart of the World (New York: DeWitt and Davenport, 1849), with a title vignette from Tudor Horton. It includes the story of an unsuccessful sculptor, possibly a satire of Walcutt. See also Theodore Bolton, The Book Illustrations of Felix Octavius Carr Darley (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1951).

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2. Cornelius Mathews, “City Article,” Arcturus, December 1840, “City Article,” Arcturus, January 1841, and “The Unrest of the Age,” Arcturus, February 1841, 133; Cornelius Mathews, “The Fine Arts,” Yankee Doodle, October 10, 1846, 5; Edgar Allen Poe, “Young America,” Broadway Journal, July 19, 1845, 26. See also Bernard Reilly, “Comic Drawing in New York in the 1850s,” in Prints and Printmakers of New York State, 1825–1940, ed. David Tatham (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986) 147–62. 3. William Gilmore Simms, a South Carolina ally of Mathews, wrote a Life of Francis Marion (1840), and was a noted defender of Southern heroism in the Revolutionary war. F. A. Chapman’s “Thanksgiving at a New England Farmhouse,” Harper’s Weekly, Supplement, December 9, 1871, 1,164, similarly places an African American maid in the doorway, but he centers the patriarch, who cuts open a pumpkin pie, not a turkey. 4. Justus Starr Redfield had been a member of the older Sketch Club, and he probably helped Darley get his plum jobs illustrating the Knickerbocker writers; see John William Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 1 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972); Madeleine B. Stern, Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth-­Century America (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980); and Madeleine B. Stern, Imprints on History: Book Publishers and American Frontiers (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1956). 5. See Sarah Burns, Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-­Century American Art and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999). 6. Editorial, “The Colored People,” Republic, January 1852, 40; “Our Book Table,” Republic 1, no. 1, January 1851, 42; “Art News,” Copway’s American Indian, September 6, 1851, 3. 7. See, for example, the temperance and nativist Crawfordsville Weekly Journal (Indiana), June 21, 1855, 2. Conservative Democrat William Sidney Mount in 1867 painted Break of Day, Museums of Stony Brook, Long Island, in which a cock representing the Radical Republicans crows on the stomach of a prone Black man, to indicate what he hoped was the “political death” of slavery as an issue. 8. On chickens and African Americans, see Psyche Williams-­Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 9. Mathews, Chanticleer, 155. 10. John Cole Hagen, “The Genius of Liberty,” in Foot-­Prints of Truth, or Voice of Humanity (New York: Cornish, Lamport, 1853), 113. 11. Young America, the organ of the National Reform Association, was published from the True Sun building (the True Sun was published by a group of disgruntled artisans—printers—who quit the Sun) starting in 1845, by George H. Evans and John Windt. It was a continuation of their Working Man’s Advocate (1844) and The People’s Rights (1844). They admired Parke Godwin, Mike Walsh, and Stephen Douglas. 12. Dallas, McLenan, and Hitchcock all contributed to the Illustrated News. Gayler hired (among others) Charles Rosenberg to illustrate for Young America—Rosenberg

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was not a Sketch Club member, but he wrote for Barnum a promotional biography of Jenny Lind, collaborated with James Cafferty on paintings, and worked with Whitley on Young Sam. Gayler also coedited the short-­lived Verdict with George G. Foster. Foster’s biographer, Stuart Blumin, New York by Gaslight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), said he turned to Native Americanism by 1841. Foster helped edit Yankee Doodle with Cornelius Mathews in 1847 and wrote for the Lantern in 1852–53, and his wife, Julie de Marguerite, wrote for the Sunday Times. See also “Charles Gayler,” The Vault at Pfaffs, ed. Edward Whitley and Rob Weidman, pfaffs. web.lehigh.edu. 13. “Art and Artists,” Young America, January 5, 1856, 4. The Evening Post, September 12, 1860, in what may have been a puff, called Jones’s busts of statesmen, available for sale as inexpensive reproductions, including Law’s, masterly. Powell, a Sketch Club attendee, would paint Perry’s Victory on Lake Erie in New York for the Ohio State Capitol in 1857; the legislature passed the resolution awarding him the commission in April 1857, the same month it passed several anti-­Catholic acts; Thomas W. Kremm, “The Old Order Trembles: The Formation of the Republican Party in Ohio,” Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin 36, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 193–215. 14. Quoted in Peter Bridges, Pen of Fire: John Moncure Daniel (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2002), 108–9. Piatt added that he did not like giving a U.S. passport to people who will just “come straight back to what they still call ‘their country’ and which ‘they too much love”; see also Peter Bridges, Donn Piatt: Gadfly of the Gilded Age (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2012). 15. Donn Piatt’s diaries, Piatt Papers, Mac-­A-­Cheek Castle, indicate he wrote for the Telegraph from at least July 10, 1840, through March 8, 1843; “Negro and White Equality,” Mac-­A- ­Cheek Press, December 11, 1858, and “Negro Suffrage,” Mac-­A-­ Cheek Press, October 8, 1859. The West Liberty, Ohio, paper was published by W. H. Gribble, but Donn Piatt’s brother Abram supervised it. It published original works by Bell Smith (Louise Piatt) and W. W. Fosdick and promoted works by Piatt’s friends Thomas Rossiter and Hiram Powers. 16. Charles Grant Miller, Donn Piatt: His Work and His Ways (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1893), 48, 88, adds Hiram Powers, J. Q. A. Ward (creator of a Simon Kenton statue), James Beard (who painted Donn’s mother; portrait at Mac-­A-­Cheek Castle), Godfrey Frankenstein (Godfrey painted Donn’s portrait in the early 1840s, looking quite Byronic, now at Mac-­A-­Cheek Castle), Shobal Clevenger, T. B. Read (an Irish nationalist), and Worthington Whittredge. Seth Cheney also knew the family. On some of these artists in the 1840s, see Wendy J. Katz, Regionalism and Reform: Art and Class Formation in Cincinnati (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002). 17. Couture’s Romans of the Decadence was also shown in 1855. On Cranch, see Donn Piatt’s Diary, March 8, 1843. Piatt was at the time sitting for a portrait by James Beard and corresponding with Godfrey Frankenstein, who was then in Philadelphia, but who grew up in Springfield, Ohio, near the Piatt home. 18. The Walcutts might also have known Louise and Ella Kirby in Cincinnati. Timothy Kirby was an Episcopalian Whig lawyer, wealthy banker, and real estate

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developer from Connecticut; he was on the board of the antislavery Farmers’ College. The portrait of Ella Kirby is at Mac-A-­Cheek Castle. Perhaps D. B. Walcutt’s Hocking Valley Picnic, 1854, Ohio History Connection, owed something to the Piatts, too. It was formerly owned by the Deshler family of Columbus, who founded the Hocking Valley Scenic Railway; Ella Kirby’s Album, 1854, Piatt Papers, Mac-A-­Cheek Castle, was given her by Donn Piatt. 19. The four Derby brothers, who all became publishers, hailed from a religious upstate New York family. Two brothers went to Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, and two stayed in New York, but they collaborated at various times, including on ventures in art, especially the Sandusky, Ohio–based Cosmopolitan Art Association, which had a New York gallery, journal, and lottery; see Walter Sutton, “The Derby Brothers: 19th Century Bookmen,” University of Rochester Library Bulletin 3, no. 2 (Winter 1948), available at https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/2444. 20. Louise Piatt, Bell Smith Abroad (New York: J. C. Derby, 1854), 136–45, 325. On Donn Piatt, see his “Rules and Regulations for 1840,” in his Diary of 1840, and his manuscript, “Science and Spiritualism,” Donn Piatt Papers, Mac-­A -­Cheek Castle, West Liberty, Ohio. 21. The 1855 painting that initially brought Yvon fame was a scene of the first Napoleon’s defeat in Russia; see Julia Thoma, The Final Spectacle: Military Painting under the Second Empire, 1855–1867 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 77–79. 22. Albert Boime, “Thomas Couture and the Evolution of Painting in Nineteenth-­ Century France,” Art Bulletin 51, no. 1 (1969): 48–56, articulates this dilemma around eclecticism. Stewart, c. 1870, commissioned a larger version of the painting that eventually hung in the grand ballroom of his hotel; see Yvon’s Great Picture, “The Genius of America” (pamphlet, Saratoga Springs, Grand Union Hotel, c. 1876), available from the New York State Museum website. Henry Derby, a Cincinnati publisher and a consul to Düsseldorf (1863), advised Stewart on art, including his purchase of a copy of Hiram Powers’s sculpture the Greek Slave (1847) in 1859. Donn Piatt owned a miniature reproduction of that statue. 23. Piatt, Bell Smith Abroad, 60, 65, 81, 69, 47, 319, 128. Walcutt’s French sketchbook, 1852–54, n.p., Walcutt Papers, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, has a very spidery study of spiders, as well as soldiers with prominent bayonets. But most of the sketchbook is of ordinary French people (sometimes caricatured) and studies of architecture and sculpture. 24. Piatt, Bell Smith Abroad, 200, 210. 25. Evening Mirror, August 18, 1854, 3; “Art Doings,” October 30, 1854, 1; Express, May 28, 1857, 1. “Sketchings,” The Crayon, January 24, 1855, 59, also records that Walcutt returned from Paris with his Overthrowing of the Statue of George III at Bowling Green and American Mazeppa. 26. See “Johannes A. Oertel,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 4, no. 3 (September 1860): 115–16, though it does not mention this painting. Also, J. F. Oertel, A Vision Realized: A Life Story of Rev. Johannes Oertel, D.D., Artist, Priest, Missionary (Milwaukee: Young Churchman, 1917). Oertel’s diaries cover from 1863 forward, at which time he

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is concerned about competition from foreign religious painters. Oertel may have known Rembrandt Lockwood when he studied in Munich. 27. Day Book, June 18, 1852, is critiquing a review of William B. Stiles’s Austria in 1848–49 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1852), which appeared in Evert Duyckinck’s and Cornelius Mathews’s Literary World, June 5, 1852, 387–88, and itself emphasized the success of the Anglo-­A merican model; Arthur Marks, “The Statue of King George III in New York and the Iconology of Regicide,” American Art Journal 13, no. 3 (Summer 1981): 61–82. Oertel would live in Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida after the Civil War. 28. Wendy Bellion, Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), 139–50; see also J. M. Mancini, “American Art’s Dark Matter: A History of Uncirculation from Revolution to Empire,” in Circulation, ed. François Brunet (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2017), 42–75, and Marks, “Statue of King George III,” 61–82. 29. See Ross Barrett, Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-­Century American Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); John C. McRae after Johannes Oertel, Pulling down the Statue of George III, by the Sons of Freedom, at the Bowling Green, City of New York, July 1776, 1859, engraving; Walcutt, “Origin of the Stars and Stripes,” manuscript attached to “Notes of a Voyage from New York City to London”; John C. McRae after Frederick Augustus Chapman, Raising the Liberty Pole, 1776, 1875, etching and engraving. 30. Walcutt, “Statue of George III in the Bowling Green, New York City,” and “Stories of my Grandfather’s Recollections of the Revolution,” manuscript attached to “Notes of a Voyage from New York City to London.” 31. There is no evidence that Walcutt (or Oertel) saw Franz Xaver Habermann’s La Destruction de la Statue Royale a Nouvelle Yorck (Augsburg, Germany, 1776), but they might have—Habermann’s engravings were also issued in Paris, and Marks, “Statue of King George III,” 74–77, describes Young America historian and New Yorker James Lloyd Stephens spotting one in Russia. Marks calls Habermann’s scenes “pure fantasies”; Bellion, Iconoclasm in New York, 138, agrees that the print is fictitious. If Walcutt had seen it, perhaps the errors in the architecture and monument would have created doubt in his mind as well about the accuracy of the depiction of the participants. 32. When evangelical Protestant (and antislavery, temperance) New England artist and inventor Rufus Porter took over the New York Mechanic newspaper in 1841, he changed its name to the American Mechanic (1842–43), and the arm and hammer appeared on the editorial page; American Mechanic, March 12, 1842, 2. See Laura Fecych Sprague and Justin Wolff, eds., Rufus Porter’s Curious World: Art and Invention in America, 1815–1860 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019). 33. Walcutt’s colleague in founding artist cooperatives, Thomas Whitley, twenty years earlier had tried for a structurally similar, but opposite, argument. In an 1834 political cartoon attacking Jacksonian populism (The People Putting Responsibility

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to the Test or the Downfall of the Kitchen Cabinet and Collar Presses, https://www .loc.gov/item/2008661770/), a crowd of well-­dressed bankers with rakes and axes defend the law, while Andrew Jackson’s henchmen try unsuccessfully to drag her— a classically robed allegorical statue—down. In the foreground, Black men celebrate. With the breakdown of the Constitution and the courts, they will be free; similarly, a Jewish broker collects money from a deceived white working-­class man. Here, the mob (of respectable white men) acts to preserve the Republic from Jacksonian democracy, which has misled the artisan. 34. The twentieth-­century collector Cornelius Michaelsen who owned the 1857 version of Walcutt’s painting also owned Irish-­A merican artist Dennis Malone Carter’s Molly Pitcher at the Battle of Monmouth (1854). He auctioned his collection in 1935: Important American Prints and Paintings Collected by Cornelius Michaelsen, Esq. (New York: Rains Galleries, 1935). 35. “National Academy of Design,” Herald, May 1, 1849, 7. 36. A scene from the Revolution! Molly Pitcher, the heroine of Monmouth, avenging her husband’s Death. A splendid picture, engraved and colored in oil, from a masterly study, by Dallas (New York: Dayton, 1861?), price, two dollars, with a free gift, worth at retail from $2 to $3. On Wallace, see William T. Coggeshall, Poets and Poetry of the West (Columbus: Follett, Foster, 1861), 227–37. Wallace spoke to the Native Americans on July 4, 1854; America’s Own, July 15, 1854. 37. See Lauren Lessing, “Theatrical Mayhem in Junius Brutus Stearns’s Hannah Duston Killing the Indians,” American Art 28, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 76–103; Mark Thistlethwaite, “Picturing the Past: Junius Brutus Stearns’s Paintings of George Washington,” Arts in Virginia 25 (1985): 12–23. On the erotics of sentiment for men, see the essays in Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, eds., Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Walcutt mentions Mrs. Abbott, of the Park Theater and Sara Allen, an American actress. He also sketched French feminist Rachel Félix. Estelle, “Elizabeth Zane,” in American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum (New York: Edward Walker, 1856), 464; J. C. Hagen, “Happiest Day of My Life,” in Odd-­Fellows Offering for 1853 (New York: Edward Walker, 1852), 154–55. 38. On Whig rhetoric sacralizing government (and reverence for it), Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 64–69. 39. Illustration of T. S. Arthur, “The Wife’s Perceptions, A Story of Woman’s Influence,” in Odd-­Fellows’ Offering for 1849, ed. Paschal Donaldson (New York: Edward Walker, 1848), 9. 40. “Tales and Traditions,” Sunday Times, June 29, 1851, 1. America’s Own in 1853 also did a story about the King George statue, perhaps reflecting their awareness of Oertel, a contributor. Buckingham edited the Island City (1846–48), published by an Odd Fellow; Benson Lossing, “Grandfather Knickerbocker,” in Odd-­Fellows’ Offering for 1853 (New York: Edward Walker, 1852), 160–70, illustrated by Eringer, 161.

NOTES TO PAGES 133–37

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41. Sunday Times: on racial mixing, June 4, 1848; Savage poem, May 5, 1850; on Washington’s birthday, February 2, 1851; on Brooks, October 15, 1848; our friend Colonel Thorpe, February 26, 1860. Jennie June, who also contributed to the Sunday Dispatch, was a regular, as January 9, 1859; on Fillmore, July 7, 1850; on Morris, July 6, 1851. 42. Michael Lind, “Do the People Rule?,” Wilson Quarterly 26 (Winter 2002): 40–49; Michelle Sizemore, American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-­Revolutionary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 6–7. 6. More Lasting Monuments

1. Walcutt’s arrival in the U.S. with a set of classicizing sculptures arguably had parallels with immigrant Italian craftsmen who peddled small plaster busts and statues on the streets of the city. In what Patricia Johnston, “ ‘I Is for Italian’: Francis W. Edmonds and the Image Peddler in Nineteenth-­Century American Visual Culture,” American Art 35, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 48–77, identified as one of the only paintings of an Italian Image Pedlar (New York Historical Society, 1844), Episcopalian banker and Matteson admirer Francis Edmonds was careful to distinguish distinctively American art like his (or Walcutt’s) from these Catholic popularizers of European fine art. In the painting, Edmonds carefully removed a bust of George Washington from the space and scale of the immigrant peddler’s commodities. Small busts of European tyrants like Napoleon and objects whose appeal was animalistic sensuality remain on the Italian’s tray or in his hands. The bust of Washington, however, is isolated, lit by a window that looks onto American nature, surrounded and protected by military reminders (not commodities, but inherited keepsakes, powder horn and flintlock) of the soldiers of the Revolution and the War of 1812. Edmonds exhibited the scene in 1844, at the height of the Native American Party’s influence in the city, and the contemporary realism of his own style set him apart from the Italian copyist, as Washington diverged from Napoleon. 2. On the competition, see Jacob Landy, “The Washington Monument Project in New York,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 28, no. 4 (December 1969): 291–97, and Wendy Katz, Humbug! (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 198–222; on Washington monuments generally, including the role of nativists, see Kirk Savage, “The Self-­Made Monument: George Washington and the Fight to Erect a National Memorial,” Winterthur Portfolio 22, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 225–42. 3. The Engraving of the Washington Monument after a Design by William Walcutt (New York: Wm. S. Dorr, 1848); Sunday Dispatch, October 8, 1848, 1; Sunday Dispatch, October 22, 1848, 2; New York Tribune, November 13, 1848; Evening Mirror, December 11, 1848. On December 12 the Mirror published Wallace’s poem to an “American editor.” The Odd Fellows’ Hall was designed by Trench and Snook, the firm that would do A. T. Stewart’s department store on Broadway, which featured eclectic architectural styles on the interior, as did the Odd Fellows’ Hall.

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4. William Walcutt, “Subjects to Paint Connected with American History,” manuscript attached to “Notes of a Voyage from New York City”; J., “Bancroft,” Arcturus, January 1841, 1. See also Richard C. Vitzthum, “Theme and Method in Bancroft’s History of the United States,” New England Quarterly 41, no. 3 (September 1968): 362–80. 5. See Ryan K. Smith, Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-­Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 6. Evening Mirror, July 13, 1844. 7. “Hints on Public Architecture,” Holden’s 4 (July 1849): 439; Subterranean, July 22, 1843, 14. 8. See also Jenna M. Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 9. “The Fine Arts,” Yankee Doodle, October 10, 1846, 5. Mathews may have shared Morse’s political views, but not Morse’s belief in the desirability of imitating old masters; see Patricia Johnston, “Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre: Social Tensions in an Ideal World,” in Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 42–65. 10. The Age of Reason called Catholicism a persecuting religion in the same issue as an A. J. H. Duganne poem (January 21, 1849), and the next month (February 13, 1849) cited stories about Catholic priests’ hostility to the Odd Fellows and the opposition of religious fanatics to land reform. Instead, editor P. Eckler, April 1, 1849, argued for Association as a principle of the day, bearing mankind forward, and supported by Odd Fellows, Trades Unions, benevolent associations, and socialists. Eckler also praised spiritualist S. B. Brittan. 11. See Eugene H. Roseboom, “Salmon P. Chase and the Know-­Nothings,” Journal of American History 25, no. 3 (December 1938): 335–50. Henry D. Cooke was a presidential elector for Fremont in the 1856 election, the same year he became sole editor and proprietor of the Sandusky Register. He took over the Columbus Ohio State Journal in 1858, assisted by William Howells (who favored religious tolerance), not long after Chauncey C. Bill bought an interest in the Sandusky paper in 1857. But whether edited by Bill or Cooke, the Register, like Sandusky, was staunchly Republican. 12. Michael McTighe, A Measure of Success: Protestants and Public Culture in Antebellum Cleveland (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 143–44, 163, argues that a Protestant elite developed a partnership with the city that kept their influence pervasive even as their numbers dropped. 13. Editorial, Plain Dealer, October 1, 1857. 14. On German anti-­Catholicism in the west, see Daniel Stein, “Transatlantic Politics as Serial Networks in the German-­American City Mystery Novel, 1850–1855,”

NOTES TO PAGES 142–46

201

in Traveling Traditions: Nineteenth-­Century Cultural Concepts and Transatlantic Intellectual Networks, ed. Erik Redling (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 247–65. 15. Americanus, letter to the editor, Plain Dealer, April 15, 1859, 1. 16. Michael J. Hynes, History of the Diocese of Cleveland (Diocese of Cleveland, 1953), 129. 17. Plain Dealer, May 1, 1858, 2, 3. 18. William Walcutt, “Recollections of the Last War, No. 8, Stories of British Marines,” Republic, December 1852, 299–303; Inauguration of the Perry Statue at Cleveland on the Tenth of September, 1860, pamphlet (Cleveland: City Council, 1861), 41–45. 19. Plain Dealer, August 21, 1860, 1. The official brochure for the inauguration was mostly composed of clips from the Herald’s coverage and was printed at the Herald’s office. 20. “American Sabbath,” Mac-­A- ­Cheek Press, April 30, 1859. The paper was run by Donn Piatt, a former Democrat, with his brother Abram and a cousin, John James Piatt, whose wife Sarah became a famous poet. The Mac-­A- ­Cheek Press also approvingly excerpted Artemus Ward. 21. Plain Dealer, April 26, 1858; Plain Dealer, April 28, 1859. The newspaper’s New York correspondent, Florentine, was very close to George P. Morris. In his character of Artemus Ward, Plain Dealer, July 17, 1859, Brown delivered a Fourth of July speech on Mount Vernon, one of Everett’s hobby horses. Everett had toured the nation delivering speeches on George Washington, and in 1860 ran for president on the Constitutional Union ticket with Southerner John Bell; Charles F. Browne, Artemus Ward: His Book (New York: Carleton, 1862), 176–86. See also Don C. Seitz, Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne): A Biography and Bibliography (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1919). 22. “Walcutt, the Sculptor,” Plain Dealer, June 24, 1859. He was citing the Ohio State Journal, published in Columbus, so may not have yet met Walcutt, or just wanted to lend him the imprimatur of that Republican paper. 23. Plain Dealer, September 4, 1860. Dodge was also the agent for an art union, the Cosmopolitan Art Association, that had got its start in Sandusky with one of the Derby publishing brothers; Benson Lossing, Pictorial Field-­Book of the War of 1812 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868), 536–41. 24. Harper’s Weekly, September 8, 1860, 568; Plain Dealer, August 30, 1860, and September 1, 1860. “American Art-­Union,” Albion, September 22, 1849, 453, a journal for expatriate Brits, said incidents of the American Revolution are not fitted for art, and painters of them extinguish ideality when they substitute Bancroft for Dante. 25. Plain Dealer: August 6, 1859; September 26, 1859, 2; October 24, 1859; October 29, 1859, 2; July 25, 1860; August 22, 1860. 26. Meetings were held at the homes of Miss Grissell, Miss S. A. Noble, Miss Shuhr, Mrs. Brooks, and Mrs. Walworth’s (where the subject was “The Pioneer”), as well as the homes of Judge Tilden, Mr. Smyth, N. H. Merwin, and a Mr. Bond;

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NOTES TO PAGES 147–50

Plain Dealer: March 22, 1860; March 14, 1860; April 5, 1860. See William H. Robinson, David Steinberg, and Mark Cole, Transformations in Cleveland Art, 1796–1946 (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996), 20. 27. N. A., Washington correspondent, Plain Dealer, February 27, 1860, 2; “The First Blow,” Plain Dealer, December 27, 1859, 2. 28. “Perry Monument,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 15, 1860, 263. 29. PKW, “O’Brien, the Sculptor of the Perry Statue,” Pilot, September 29, 1860; John O’Brien, “The Sculptor of the Perry Statue,” Pilot, October 6, 1860. The Pilot was not the official newspaper of Boston’s Catholic bishop, but the bishop exercised influence over it and modified its editors’ sympathies with Irish nationalism (and any corresponding anti-­English sentiments). See also “Sculptors and Sculpture,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal 4, no. 4 (December 1860): 181–82; Katz, Humbug!, 223–26. 30. Harper’s Weekly, September 8, 1860, 567–68, and December 22, 1860, 803. George W. Curtis, who wrote as the Lounger for Harper’s Weekly, though an upper-­ class Seward Whig who was hostile to the Know-­Nothings, spoke for thirty years on behalf of American liberty as both Protestant and antislavery. Before Harper’s, he wrote on art for Greeley’s Tribune, with little sympathy for allegory, and coedited Putnam’s with Parke Godwin; see Gordon Milne, George W. Curtis & the Genteel Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956). On Thorpe and Dallas, see “Jacob A. Dallas,” Sunday Dispatch, September 13, 1857, 4. Walcutt regularly sent his sons both Harper’s and Leslie’s when they were staying in the country; see letter to Macy, August 27, 1878, and letter to Macy, August 11, 1880, Walcutt papers, Archives of American Art. 31. Agnes Leeds Walcutt died at age thirty-­nine in 1875, and is buried in Green-­ wood Cemetery, Brooklyn. Walcutt also designed the Dr. Samuel M. Smith Statue in Columbus, Ohio, 1880, a bronze on a pedestal with a drinking fountain for horses, dogs, and people. Smith was an abolitionist. Walcutt had also painted members of the Smith family: Flora W. and Eugene Smith, in 1857, children of Thomas Eugene and Flora Ann Smith, whom Walcutt also painted. In Walcutt’s letter to his son Macy on July 12, 1879, Walcutt papers, Archives of American Art, at the same time as he is beginning modeling the Smith statue, he mentions the arrival of a statue for Mr. Zinn in Cincinnati; Paletta, “Art Matters,” American Art Journal 6, no. 1 (October 25, 1866): 7, identifies him as also working on a statue of Mr. Wade, who is connected with telegraphing. Jeptha Wade, a portrait painter and telegraph constructor based in New York and Cleveland, became president of Western Union Telegraph in 1866. Walcutt’s Perry Monument was moved to (Jeptha) Wade Park in Cleveland in 1894. 32. Melissa Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-­ Century Rome (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 5–7. 33. Walcutt’s spelling of her name (“Musidora” in the Thomson poem) might suggest a link to the 1866 neoclassical statue by William Theed (the younger) for the Prince of Wales, which was reproduced as a tabletop sculpture by the Crystal Palace Art Union and was pictured with that spelling in the Illustrated London News

NOTES TO PAGES 150–52

203

in 1868. But Paletta, “Art Matters,” American Art Journal 6, no. 1, October 25, 1866, 7, mentions that Walcutt had the clay model in hand for Musadora, which probably rules out Theed’s influence. He also notes that William Powell is working on his painting of Perry’s Victory for the Ohio Capitol. 34. In the 1870 census, two domestic servants lived in the Walcutt household: Anna Kelly, age eighteen, and Catherine McCarthy, age fourteen, both born in New York. The Walcutts had $9,000 in real estate (they owned a house in Mount Vernon, New York) and $3,000 in personal estate. Conclusion: Walcutt’s Revival

1. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is a major and significant exception, and there was a special emphasis on excluding Asians in subsequent immigration legislation. On ethnic and labor hostility to the Chinese, see Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 2. The most comprehensive interpretation is William B. Rhoads, “The Colonial Revival,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1974). See also Richard Guy Wilson and Shaun Eyring, eds., Recreating the American Past: Essays on the Colonial Revival (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), and Carma Gorman, Exceptional: A History of Industrial Design in the USA (London: Reaktion, forthcoming). 3. On revolutionary history as a sectional battleground, see John Hope Franklin, “The North, the South and the American Revolution,” Journal of American History 62, no. 1 (June 1975): 5–23. 4. T. P. Rossiter, A Description of the Picture of the Home of Washington after the War, Painted by T. P. Rossiter and L. R. Mignot (New York: D. Appleton, 1859). See also Lydia Brandt, First in the Homes of His Countrymen: George Washington’s Mount Vernon in the American Imagination (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016); Karal Ann Marling, Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876–1986 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 5. George Washington advocated for religious liberty: Paul F. Boller, “George Washington and Religious Liberty,” William and Mary Quarterly 17, no. 4 (October 1960): 486–506. The Evening Mirror, which by the 1850s was a conservative Whig/ nativist paper and noted Walcutt’s doings, observed on October 6, 1854, and on October 26, 1854, that Wallace and fellow nativist poet A. J. H. Duganne were speaking on the “True American” and “America and Republicanism,” respectively. Both the genteel Evening Mirror and the artisanal America’s Own published Wallace’s poems, and the latter, June 24, 1854, mentioned that he spoke on pioneer Simon Kenton. 6. Rhoads, “Colonial Revival,” 18–19. 7. Christopher W. Shaw, “The Country Life Commission and Immigration,” Agricultural History 85, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 520–39, illustrates this combination of forces among some of the promoters of the Colonial Revival. See, more generally,

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Robert F. Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics: The Dillingham Commission, 1900–1927 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004), and Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). 8. On the election of 1867, see Daniel R. Porter, “Governor Rutherford B. Hayes,” Ohio History Journal 77, nos. 1–3 (1968): 59–75, 191–92. Hayes supported suffrage. 9. See especially David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American History (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 2001). 10. “The Speech of a Prophet,” Providence Magazine 28, June 1916, 375. 11. Augustine Joseph Hickey Duganne, “The True Republic,” dedicated to Young America, Duganne’s Poetical Works (Autograph edition, 1865), 97. See also Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 21–22, and Clark D. Halker, For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-­Poems and Labor Protest, 1865–95 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 70, 119. Duganne fought for the Union in the Civil War and went on to support the Knights of Labor, which began as a secret order for skilled and unskilled workers (banning bankers, lawyers, liquor dealers, and gamblers), but which then turned into a very inclusive labor union with a producerist, cooperative ethos. 12. Annals of the Early Settlers Association of Cuyahoga County 1, no. 1 (Cleveland: Mount & Carroll, 1880). Membership rules gradually relaxed until by 1928 only forty years’ residence was required; J. H. A. B., “Edwin Cowles,” Annals of the Early Settlers Association of Cuyahoga County 2, no. 11(Cleveland: Cleveland Printing & Publishing, 1890), 447–51. 13. Annals of the Early Settlers Association of Cuyahoga County 5 (1904): 386–87. Mary Rice Hunt, Harvey Rice’s daughter and a member of the Association, was the largest contributor to the fund to cast the bronze; she had in 1921 arranged for a fence to be built to protect the statue. The Association began meeting on September 10 in 1902. The bronze replica was initially located in Gordon Park and is today at Fort Huntington Park in downtown Cleveland. 14. Annals of the Early Settlers Association of Cuyahoga County, Perry Monument ed. (Cleveland: Gates Legal Publishing, 1928): “List of Contributors,” 76–87, “Dedication,” 73–74. Poet Charles S. Whittern, a Methodist, self-­published a volume nostalgic for rustic youth and a land “where clergymen control each town”: Little Red Schoolhouse and Other Poems (Cleveland, 1902), 43. 15. Lincoln Steffens, The Struggle for Self-­G overnment (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1906), 123, 125. The articles in the book were originally published in McClure’s Magazine in 1905. 16. Steffens, Struggle, 168. Donn Piatt owned a cottage in Narragansett, Rhode Island. 17. Burchard was elected to the State Assembly as an Independent, or Progressive, in 1905, though he subsequently became a regular Republican; Michael Pearlman, To Make Democracy Safe for America: Patricians and Preparedness in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); “Statue of Perry Is Unveiled Here

NOTES TO PAGES 158–60

205

Amid Ceremonies,” Providence Evening Bulletin, September 19, 1928, 1, 3. In January 1910, the Rhode Island legislature endorsed printing, in Italian, Burchard’s address on the life and character of George Washington, to be distributed by the state librarian; Acts and Resolves Passed by the General Assembly of the State of Rhode Island (Office of the Secretary of State, 1910), 342. 18. “Bishop Perry Lauds R.I. Hero,” Providence Evening Bulletin, September 19, 1928, 1; “Will Unveil Perry Statue,” Providence Evening Bulletin (missing date), 1928; clippings provided by David Walcutt. 19. Richard M. Ketchum, ed., The American Heritage Book of the Revolution (New York: American Heritage, 1958), 96; Thomas B. Allen, ed., We Americans (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1975), 90–91; Richard B. Morris, ed., The “Life” History of the United States, vol. 2, The Making of a Nation (New York: Time-­Life, 1975), 19. 20. For example, Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington’s Who Are We? America’s Great Debate (New York: Free Press, 2005) answered his question with an assertion of Anglo-­Protestant identity; Jeffrey Haynes’s From Huntington to Trump: Thirty Years of the Clash of Civilizations (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2019), gives this view central place in right-­wing populism. 21. Charles C. Walcutt, a Civil War general, became the Republican mayor of Columbus. One of his descendants would actively campaign for Bob Taft at the Republican nominating convention of 1952. 22. Louise Torrey Taft, letter to her sister Annie Torrey, July 12, 1857, William Howard Taft National Historic Site, Cincinnati, Ohio; transcripts of Taft personal correspondence courtesy of Ruth M. Horstman. Walcutt’s list of paintings appended to his manuscript, “Notes of a voyage from New York City to London,” has a “Daughter of Mrs. Taft from recollection” too. The four Walcutt portraits of the Tafts are at the Taft National Historic Site in Mount Auburn, where the Tafts had their home. In Columbus, Perry wrote for and briefly owned the Ohio State Journal; Robert D. Sawrey, Dubious Victory: The Reconstruction Debate in Ohio (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 111. 23. The Walcutts visited Cincinnati in July–August 1857 and February–March 1859. Peter Rawson Taft (Alphonso’s father) in his diary and Louise Taft in her correspondence document their activities; Taft National Historic Site. The Tafts, like the Walcutts, owned a painting by William Sonntag, an antislavery Cincinnati and New York artist who in 1847 created an optimistic series of (lost) paintings on the Progress of Civilization for Baptist minister and art collector Elias Magoon, based on William C. Bryant’s 1821 poem “The Ages,” which hails the U.S. as a race formed from the American wilderness and so “Here the free spirit of mankind at length / Throws its last fetters off,” eventually to rescue Europe from its chains as well; see Nancy Moure, William Louis Sonntag, Artist of the Ideal, 1822–1900 (Los Angeles: Goldfield Galleries, 1980). 24. Luke Ritter, Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis: Political Nativism in the Antebellum West (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 148–73. See Moncure Conway’s Autobiography: Memories and Experiences of Moncure Conway

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in Two Volumes (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Company, 1908), 1:224, where he says he was intimate with the otherwise conservative Taft. Conway officiated at Artemus Ward’s funeral in London, even though Ward had disliked Conway’s views when he heard him preach in Cincinnati. 25. Hayes, quoted in Porter, “Governor Rutherford B. Hayes,” 71. 26. Lewis Alexander Leonard, The Life of Alphonso Taft (New York: Hawke, 1920), 105. See Eileen Muccino, “Irish Filibusters and Know-­Nothings in Cincinnati,” Ohio Valley History (Fall 2010): 15–17. Perry and Oren Follett were partners in the Ohio State Journal from March 1854 to February 1855. Also on the editorial staff was a private secretary for Dennison. On Dennison, Spooner, and Follett’s (and the Ohio Republicans generally) connection to the Know-­Nothings, see John B. Weaver, “The Decline of the Know-­Nothings, 1856–60,” Cincinnatii Historical Society Bulletin 40, no. 4 (December 1982): 235–46; Eugene H. Roseboom, “Salmon P. Chase and the Know-­Nothings,” Journal of American History 25, no. 3 (December 1938); William E. Van Horne, “Lewis D. Campbell and the Know-­Nothing Party in Ohio,” Ohio History Journal 76, no. 4 (Autumn 1967): 202–21, notes 270–73; and Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know-­Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 68–71. 27. Ritter, Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis, 148–73. 28. Letter from Louise Taft to her sister Susie, February 13, 1859. Ishbel Ross, An American Family: The Tafts, 1678–1964 (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1964), 5, describes Alphonso’s mother as “a devout Baptist, a temperance advocate, and a woman of spirit, although narrow-­minded toward other faiths.” Alphonso’s parents lived with their son’s family in Cincinnati. 29. Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics, 124–25; Katherine D. Moran, “Catholicism and the Making of the U.S. Pacific,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 12, no. 4 (October 2013): 434–74.

Index

Abraham Freeborn: 67–68, 74–76, 186n26. See also Cooper, James Fenimore: Pioneers Achenbach, Andreas: 46 African Americans: in allegories, 93, 100; in art, 34, 125–27, 168n6, 194n7; civil rights of, 154, 204n8; and cultural nationalism, 18, 20, 107, 117; and fraternal associations, 50; on the frontier, 67–68, 76; music of, 107, 143; as native-­born, 4, 48, 112, 144; stereotypes in popular illustration, 109–12, 194n3, 197–98n33 Albion (New York): 94, 201n24 Albion: 149 allegory, in art: as expression of the spiritual, 77, 148; and fairies, 82, 92, 98, 100, 114; as fantasy, 114; as female, 15, 29, 99, 100, 148; and genre pictures, 93; as moralized nature, 56, 61, 92; popularity of, 16, 113, 197–98n33, 202n30; as religious, 11, 29, 51, 99, 183n38; as universal ideals, 33, 47, 51, 100, 119. See also liberty Allston, Washington: 192–93n48 America’s Own (New York): on art, 51–52, 177– 78n36: as Associationist, 80, 91, 120, 148; as working-­class paper, 30–31, 80, 91, 175n18; works in (mastheads, 20, 31–33, 32, 92, 120; “Monument to Young Tindale,” 29–33, 148); writing in, 31, 78, 198n40, 203n5. See also the United American Mechanics American Artists Association: as a cooperative, 39–44, 179nn8,10,11; links to Associationism, 91, 98; members of, 44, 51, 87, 137; as opposed to art-­unions, 40, 43, 44; support of, 172n43, 173n4, 176–77n32

American Art-­Union: as art purchaser, 13, 41, 170–71nn27,28, 178n1; and a native school of art, 9, 15–16, 41–42, 43; opposition to, 40, 41–44, 141, 179nn8,11; and the print market, 16, 41, 171n31, 187n39; purchases of New York Sketch Club artists, 190n24 American Baptist Mission Society: 78 American Bible Society: 12, 159, 170n21, 174n9 American Daguerre Association: 178n39 American Home Missionary Society: 12 American Indians: as assimilated, 18, 69, 72–74, 112; in associations, 50, 72, 182n29; versus Christian civilization, 9, 63–65, 130, 145, 184–85n11; in European art, 57, 61; and fairy tales, 92, 112; identified with nature, 15, 33, 54–56, 61, 68; identified with territories, 59, 109, 124–26; as kin to the common man, 21, 67, 69, 112, 184n11; and “native Americans,” 167n14; as native-­born, 23, 33, 52, 72–73, 126; as a race, 52, 55–56, 64–65; and sovereignty, 72–74; as symbols of liberty, 23, 56 American Metropolitan Magazine: 181n23 American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum: publisher and editor, 8; works in (“The First Snow-­ Storm,” 87, 190n24; “Joel Wetsel,” 54–56, 55; “Last of Their Race,” 65, 74, 185n20; “Village Politicians,” 35, 176n28; “Voyage of Life,” 8, 169n16; “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” 16–18; “Wetzel, the Indian Hunter,” 54–56; “Elizabeth Zane,” 129–30) American Party. See Know-­Nothing Party American People’s Journal: 82–85, 86–87 American Protestant Association: 43 American Republican Party: 1, 4, 10, 12–13, 160

207

208 INDEX American Sunday School Union: 12 American Tract Society: 12, 23, 78, 173n1, 187–88n2 Americanus: 5, 141 Anderson, Hans Christian: 167–68n3 Andrews, Ambrose: 44 Anglo-­African: 88, 107 Anglo-­A merican: in the colonial period, 71, 138; as the common man, 57, 137, 151, 197n27; as Protestant, 25, 100, 143, 148, 152; as a shared literature, 61, 92, 112–13, 149, 190n26; as a shared tradition, 4, 8, 31, 47, 71. See also Anglo-­Saxon Anglo-­Saxon: as including African Americans, 107; as brethren, 80, 142; versus the Celtic, 147; as Protestant, 5, 112, 152; as a race, 47, 63, 78, 80, 94; as republican, 31, 125, 137 anti-­Catholicism: in art, 2, 11–12, 52, 92, 173n2; among artists, 49; and cultural nationalists, 50–51; directed at Jesuits, 7, 13, 50, 154; in the press, 8, 14, 78, 92, 143, 148; and separation of church and state, 160–61; and temperance, 95. See also anti-­Romanism anti-­Romanism: and anticlericalism, 49, 50, 124, 144, 165; and artisans, 8, 23–24; in political rhetoric, 11, 26–27, 66–67, 155, 161. See also anti-­Catholicism antislavery: and artists, 28, 33–34, 36, 76, 205n23; and Democrats, 27, 63, 88, 117; and German immigrants, 48; and international democracy movements, 124, 192n43; and nativists, 4, 36, 37, 85, 127, 154 (skeptics among, 5, 20, 30); and the press, 52, 77, 80, 147, 180– 81n17, 202n30 (in Ohio, 143, 155); as a Protestant reform, 33, 77, 111, 117, 146; and Protestant reformers, 27, 80, 88, 187n1 (in Ohio, 28, 88, 146, 195–96n18); and the Republican Party, 49, 66, 112–13, 134 (in Ohio, 139–40, 141, 160); and temperance, 193n50, 197n32; and transcendentalists, 88, 107 art critics: 9, 12, 42, 99, 125, 190n28; and the Sketch Club, 52–53, 114–16 art galleries: in Cleveland, 145; commercial, 69, 170n23, 177–78n36, 180n14, 187n34; cooperative, 43–44, 179nn8,11, 196n19; domestic, 65; imagined, 88–89, 190n28; and print dealers, 5, 6, 12, 37, 122 art market: 9, 40, 42; for paintings, 41; for prints, 12, 16; for sculpture, 150 art patrons: commercial, 37, 38; individuals as, 37, 82, 155, 172n35; institutional, 9, 12 41, 43, 176–77n32; political parties as, 33, 36, 114, 135, 156; Protestant, 148, 193n50; for public art, 135, 142, 155–57 Art Re-­Union: 15–16

artisans: in art, 31–32 (as African American, 126–27; as sailors, 34, 57, 67, 145, 155; as soldiers, 4, 21, 23, 31; with tools, 31, 126–27, 197n32; women as, 47, 127–32; as yeomen farmers, 34, 119); artists as, 36, 38, 45 (and art associated with, 33, 34, 145, 147); in cross-­class alliances, 1, 30, 125–27; and fraternal associations, 42–44, 45, 53 (and convivial drinking, 35–36, 47, 70, 127, 132); impact of immigration on, 1, 31, 66, 67, 119; impact of industrialization on, 42, 56, 178n39 (and manufacturers, 67, 98, 140–41); modes of cooperation of, 39–40, 43, 91 (versus the family, 99–100, 127–28); and print culture, 8, 9, 14, 16, 23 (media aimed at, 20, 30, 194n11, 203n5); and republican ideology, 42, 57, 119, 139, 141–42; as revolutionary, 125–27, 135, 138, 197–98n33; as target for nativists, 30. See also artists; mechanics; working class artists: associations of, 15–16, 20–21, 39–45, 98–99, 179n10 (and fraternalism of, 16, 45– 47, 51, 53, 180nn15,16); careers of, 11, 33–34, 38, 150 (as illustrators, 12, 92; role of publishing in, 9, 95; and study abroad, 118–19, 146– 47); compared to artisans, 36, 37, 38, 174n7; effect of nationalism on, 8–9, 11, 15, 112, 186n27; as idealists, 18, 77, 88; image of, 85, 98–99; impact of industrialization on, 42, 86, 178n39; support for democratic movements, 117, 182n26. See also New York Sketch Club Asmonean: 88 Associationism: 40, 86, 88, 91, 98; supporters of, 88, 98, 200n10 Austria: xi, 49, 197n27 backwoodsman: 8, 44, 54–56; alliance with elite, 71, 75, 184n3, 186n30; and American Indians, 54–56, 64–65; as anti-­commercial, 55, 64, 69–70; and artisans, 56, 57, 133; as comic, 57, 68; as natural American, 56, 57, 59, 67, 133; and women, 55, 67, 133. See also frontiers; pioneers Bailey, Keyes Arthur: 128 Baker and Scribner: 78, 171n32 Baltimore: 50, 172n36 Bancroft, George: 137, 142–43, 144, 166–67n11, 201n24 Baptists: 28, 30, 206n28; ministers, 41, 80, 169n16, 191n35, 205n23 Barker, James W.: 31, 179n7, 189n18 Barrett, Ross: 125 Barry, Charles A.: 180n14 Beach, Charles L.: xiv, 166n9

INDEX

Beard, John: 177–78n36, 179n8, 195nn16,17 beards: 85–86 Beaux Arts, Academy of (École des Beaux-­ Arts): 62, 117, 118, 119, 145 Beecher, Henry Ward: 27, 52 Beecher, Lyman: 95 Bellion, Wendy: 125 Belmont, August: 142, 144, 166–67n11 Benedict, George A.: 143. See also Herald (Cleveland) Benjamin, Park: 169n18, 182n28, 188n9 Betsy Temple: 75–76. See also Cooper, James Fenimore: Pioneers Bible: illustrated, 12, 92; in pictures, 14–15, 49, 90, 93, 119; Protestant, 28, 47, 67, 140, 174n10; in schools, 4, 27, 33, 67, 160 Billy Kirby: 69, 76. See also Cooper, James Fenimore: Pioneers Blaine, James: 26–27 Blauvelt, Charles F.: career of, 48–49, 173– 74n5; as a Sketch Club member, 180nn14,16, 182n26; works by (First Snow-­Storm, 87, 190n24; A German Immigrant Inquiring His Way, 48; Luther Reading the Bible, 49; No News, 181n22) Blondell, Jacob: 48, 180nn14,16, 181n24 Bodmer, Karl: The American Mazeppa, 57, 58, 61, 63, 122 Boone, Daniel: 61 Boston: 10 Boutelle, De Witt Clinton: 42 Bowery Theatre: 24, 30, 173–74n5 Bowling Green, New York: 31, 126, 132–33, 137–38 Bown, Nicola: 91 Boyle, Ferdinand: 40, 177–78n36, 180n14, 181n19 Bradford, A. N.: 182–83n33 Brady, Mathew: 178n39, 179n11 Brewster, James: 193n50 Britain: actors from, 175n17; aristocratic character of, 71, 75, 107, 148; in art, 4, 35, 123, 125; artists from, 9, 41, 44, 92, 97, 181n19 (involved in art associations, 47, 98, 105, 167– 68n3, 177–78n36); common people of, 35, 94, 142 (as sailors, 56, 57, 67, 71, 142); compared to the U.S., 47, 57, 63, 127, 142; history of, 9, 12, 95, 184–85n11 (as industrialized, 78; as monarchy and empire, 9, 12, 147, 160, 202n29); as kindred nation, 25, 51, 107, 142, 148; literature of, 47, 92, 112–13, 149, 190n26 (English Bible, 14–15, 171n32; fairy tales, 94, 97); as a prestigious genealogy, 36, 57; as source of republican liberty, 57, 125, 139, 151; wars with, 25, 67, 139, 142; writers from, 78,

209 108, 167–68n3, 169n15, 183n34. See also Anglo-­A merican; Ireland Brittan, Samuel B.: 82, 84, 200n10 Bronson, Greene C.: 168–69n12 Brooke, William Henry: 97, 192n43 Brooks, Erastus: 15, 49 Brooks, James: 133, 166–67n11 Brotherhood of the Union: 30–31, 91, 165n3, 174–75n16 brotherhood: as alternative to the domestic, 13, 43, 98–99, 127–28, 132; and artisanal culture, 3, 30, 39, 47; as egalitarian, 8, 50, 51; as ethnic, 72, 80, 91; as militant band, 7, 125; as model for reformers, 53, 84, 90–91; as native-­born, 7, 73, 91; as protection from capitalism, 30, 43, 45–46; as Protestant, 5, 43, 51. See also fraternal associations Brougham, John: as dramatist, 47–48, 49, 95; as editor of the Lantern, 18, 30, 48, 49, 97, 172n42; as illustrator, 181n23; and the Sketch Club, 47, 180n14 Brown, Charles Farrar. See Ward, Artemus Brown, Henry Kirke: 135 Brueckner, Henry: 16–18; “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” 18, 137 Brush, John Y.: 180nn14,16 Bryan, William Jennings: 162 Bryant, William C.: as editor of the Evening Post, 174n9; works by (“The Ages,” 205n23; Scribner’s Popular History, 26–27; “Seventy-­ Six,” 15) Buckingham, Henry A.: 132–33, 169n14, 198n40 Buffon, Comte de.: 62–63 Bunce, Oliver Bell: 182n28 Buntline, Ned: 97, 171n32, 175n18, 188n8, 192n44 Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress, 78, 92, 191n34 Burchard, Roswell: 154, 156, 158, 204–5n17 Burchard, Samuel D.: and the arts, 26, 28–29, 33, 45, 47; church of, 16, 65, 187n1; as minister, 26, 28, 77–78, 80, 156, 187n1; in Ohio, 28, 30, 174n11; as reformer, 26–29. See also Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church Burkhardt, Charles: career of, 94–95, 112, 171n30; as editor, Sunday Dispatch, 51, 52– 53, 78, 84, 94–95 (and as writer for, 16, 79– 80); as Sketch Club member, 16, 50, 51, 52–53, 180n14; works by (Fairy Tales of Many Nations, 78, 94–97, 100, 101, 103) Burns, James: 44, 180n14; Washington Crowned by Equality, Fraternity and Liberty, 44, 51, 137, 180n13, 183n34 Burr, Charles Chauncey: 80, 82, 84, 165n3

210 INDEX Bush, John, T.: 44 Butler, James J.: 147 Butler, Simon. See Kenton, Simon Buttre, John Chester: 13 Butts, Bolivar: 146, 155 Byram, J. H.: 29 Byron, Lord: 57, 59, 195n16 Cafferty, James: career of, 48, 180n16, 181n24, 194–95n12; portrayal of Washington, 180n13; and the Sketch Club, 47, 169n15, 176–77n32, 180n14, 182n26; works by (“Picture of the Lord,” 94–97, 96) California: 8, 36, 106, 113, 133 Carter, Dennis Malone: 198n34 Carter, Henry. See Leslie, Frank Cary, Alice: 73, 180n14 Case, Leonard: 146 Case, Norman: 158 Cass, Lewis: 33, 42, 166–67n11, 175n24, 176n30 Catholic Church: as allied with monarchies, 49, 61, 94, 97; and art, 52, 92, 137, 191n34; churches and dioceses of, 57, 140, 155, 158, 177–78n36; as controlling the faithful, 23–24, 49, 77, 152; as despotic, 12, 49, 78, 141; and fraternal orders, 50, 172n36, 200n10; presses of, 11, 49, 117, 147, 202n29; priests of, 11, 24, 95, 100, 154; as requiring obedience, 42, 82, 125; and slavery, 144; as threat to the republic, 7, 26, 105, 125. See also Rome Catholic Telegraph (Cincinnati): 117, 195n15 Catholics: as citizens, 31, 156, 162, 192n42; as Democrats, 26, 158, 160; in history, 9, 12, 162; as interfering with Protestant custom, 4, 5, 27, 108, 199n1; as members of associations, 47–49, 50; prejudice against, 4, 7, 52; as voters, 1, 7, 49, 156, 158. See also anti-­Catholicism Catskill Mountain House: xiv, 166n9 Catskills: xiv Century Club: 44, 98 Chanticleer: 112–14; Chanticleer (Indiana), 113. See also Mathews, Cornelius Chapin, E. H.: 80, 176n31, 188n8. See also Symbol Chapman, Frederick A.: career of, 9, 16, 180n14 (as a historical painter, 11–12, 18, 112); portrait of, 44; works by (“Opening Scene,” “Infidelity,” “Fanaticism,” in Foot-­Prints of Truth, 88, 89–90; Perils of Our Forefathers, 9–10; Sons of Liberty, 125; “Thanksgiving at a New England Farmhouse,” 11, 194n3) Chapman, Jacob: 113 Charles Scribner’s Sons: 27, 174n9. See also Baker and Scribner

Chase, Salmon P.: 140, 176–77n32 Chaucer: 112 Cheney, Seth: 195n16 chickens: 113, 194n8; roosters, 112–14, 194n7. See also Chanticleer Child, Edmund: 30–31, 33, 51, 174–75n16 Chinese: 73, 182n29, 203n1 Christian Advocate: 78, 174n15 Christian Inquirer: 87, 89, 190n29 Church, Frederic E.: 180n14 Cincinnati Sketch Club: 40, 185n19 Cincinnati, Ohio: art in, 128, 159, 185n16; art associations in, 40, 128, 160; artists in, 33, 36, 40, 118, 139; editors in, 30, 118, 159, 174– 75n16, 178n37; impact of industrialization on, 42; nativism in, 160; presses in, 117, 184n7, 196nn19,22 Citizen: 181n24 citizenship: and African Americans, 107, 112, 117, 127; and Catholics, 31; efforts to define, 124–26, 133–34; and immigrants, 24, 48–49, 108, 117, 181n24; as including workers, 12, 35, 42; as property of the native-­born, 7, 12, 44, 52 (and American Indians, 72–74); and nativists, 5–6, 7–8, 30–31, 37, 152; as Protestant, 30–31; restrictions on, 16, 30–31; and women, 127, 132 Civil War (Britain): 9, 12 Civil War (U.S.): 3, 67, 142–43, 148; in art, 88, 100; memorialization of, 154 (at Gettysburg, 154, 158); political realignments of, 5, 27, 49, 151, 154 Clark, D. W. C.: 78 Clark, Lewis G.: and artists, 16, 166n9, 187n34; as editor of the Knickerbocker, 14, 25, 99, 188n8, 190n26; works by (“Freedom’s Holy Cause,” 14–15, 25, 131) Clark, Myron H.: 168–69n12 Clarke, Robert A.: 180n14 Clawson, Mary Ann: 42–43 Clay, Henry: and the Compromise of 1850, 63, 108, 176n30; political symbols of, 34, 176n25 (Clay medal, 36–38, 84, 176–77n32); portraits of, 47, 49, 62, 117, 185n16 Cleanwork/Cleinwarth, Herr: 180n14, 181n19 Cleveland Review: 146 Cleveland Sketch Club: 40, 64, 93, 146, 201–2n26 Cleveland, Grover: 26–27 Cleveland, Ohio: Catholics in, 140, 147, 155; fusion politics in, 141, 147, 156, 160; historical societies of, 155–56; newspapers in, 140– 41, 142, 143, 146; parks of (Fort Huntington Park, 204n13; Gordon Park, 155, 204n13; Wade Park, 155); Protestants in, 140, 142, 155,

INDEX

200n12; public square of, 135, 140, 141; rivalry with Sandusky, 140–41; society in, 142, 143, 146, 155, 159 Clevenger, Shobal: 195n16 Cole, Thomas: xiv, 3, 87, 166n9; Voyage of Life, 8, 73, 169n16, 187n39 Colonial Dames: 155 Colonial Revival: 151–55, 158–59, 203–4n7 Columbian magazine: 171n30, 173–74n5 Columbus, Christopher: 18–19, 20–21, 42, 172n41, 193n53 Columbus, Ohio: art and artists in, 33–36, 117–18, 176–77n32, 202n31 (at the Athenaeum, 177–78n36; the Capitol, 38, 59, 195n13; the cemetery, 148–49); Know-­ Nothings in, 160; publishers in, 196n19; reform movements in, 28, 148; Republicans in, 200n11, 201n22, 205nn21–22; surrounding region, 28, 59, 117–18, 146, 195–96n18; Walcutt museum and depot, 38, 69, 177n33 and 34; Whigs in, 35–36, 159–60, 175n23, 176–77n32 Colyer, Vincent: 180n14, 182n26 Compromise of 1850: and the Union, 8, 11, 13, 127; portrayals of, 36–37, 108–9, 113–15, 176n30; support for, 36–37, 48, 82, 133, 187n1 (by Know-­Nothings, 37, 76, 80, 166–67n11) Cone, Spencer Wallace: 191n35 Congregationalists: 28, 148, 156, 174n10 Connecticut: art depicting, 9, 100, 131–32; artists from, 9, 11, 100, 193n50; as part of New England, 132, 155 Constitutional Union Party: leaders of, 11, 153, 176n30, 201n21; as third party, 11, 49, 76 Conway, Moncure: 160, 205–6n24 Cook, Clarence: 183n37 Cooper, James Fenimore: as anti-­capitalist, 69, 71, 109; and artists, 97, 98, 187n34; and backwoodsmen, 67–72; and eclecticism, 70–71, 108; and nativism, 71–72, 112; portrait of, 187n34; works by (History of the Navy of the United States of America, 142; Last of the Mohicans, 58, 59, 61; Pioneers, 65, 67–72, 74–75, 186nn25,27) Copway, George: 72, 74, 97–98 Copway’s American Indian: 48, 112 Cornelius, Peter von: 190n28 Cortés, Hernán: 18, 19 Corwin, Thomas: 140 Cosmopolitan Art Association: 196n19, 201n23 Cosmopolitan Art Journal: 48, 147 Couture, Thomas: 117–18, 195n16 Cowles, Edwin: 155. See also Leader Cox, Jacob: 154

211 Cox, Samuel Hanson: 52, 183n36, 187n1 Coyle, W. H.: 180n14 Cranch, C. P.: in Paris, 117; as a transcendentalist, 88, 182n26; works by (“Graphic Muse,” 91, 100, 101; The Last of the Huggermuggers, 190–91n32) Cranch, John: 88, 180n14, 182n26 Crayon: 87, 190n23 Cromwell, Oliver: 9, 95 cultural nationalism: as democratic, 88; and a distinctive American art, 18–19, 47, 72, 94 (and native artists, 107, 143); and imitation of foreign styles, 71–72, 138; and preserving the Union, 79–80. See also Young America Cummings, Thomas, S.: 180n14 Currier, Nathaniel.: Mazeppa, 57, 59; The United American, 1–3, 2, 5, 12, 168n6; View of the Great Conflagration, 138 Cuvier, Georges: 62–63 Daguerreian Journal: 86, 174n7, 178n39 Daily News (New York): 83 Dallas, Jacob: as illustrator of fairy tales, 191n35; as illustrator for books (Jesuits in Our Homes, 50; Life of Sam Houston, 50; Mysteries and Miseries of the Queen City, 182n28; Tenant House, 50); as illustrator for newspapers (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 148, 180–81n17, 182n28; Illustrated American News, 182n28, 194–95n12; Yankee Notions, 182n28); and the Sketch Club, 50, 148, 176–77n32, 180nn14,16; works by (Ariel, 50, 92–93, 94, 100, 182n28; Molly Pitcher, 129–30; “Young Lovers,” 108, 112) Dallas, Mary Kyle: 132, 180n14, 182n28 Darley, F. O. C.: career of, 97–98, 179n11, 186n25, 192n42, 194n4; as illustrator for (J. F. Cooper, 97, 187n34; Holden’s, 98; Washington Irving, 97, 98; Margaret, 112; Sunday Mercury, 97, 192n44); works by (“Thanksgiving Dinner,” 108–12, 109) Darlington, Gilbert: 11, 170n21 Daughters of 1812: 155 Daughters of the American Revolution: 16, 155, 172n37 Day Book (New York): 15, 124, 125 Day, Benjamin: 14, 171n29 Day, Parsons: 174–75n16 Dean, Julia: 30, 45, 175n17, 176–77n32, 180n14 Deas, Charles: Turkey Shoot, 68, 69, 70, 74, 186n27 Delacroix, Eugène: Mazeppa on the Dying Horse, 59–61, 60

212 INDEX Democratic Party: and antislavery, 63, 113, 114, 154; attitudes to American Indians, 59, 74; Catholics in, 26–27, 140, 158, 160; in Cleveland, 5, 140–44; and immigrants, 5, 119, 140, 144; and nativism, 57, 130, 135, 141, 151 (as ­anticlericalism, 144); patronage of, 33, 114, 135, 142; presses, 8, 88, 98, 135, 147, 148; in Rhode Island, 157–58; and the working class, 13, 97, 138; and Young America, 12–14, 20–21, 49, 114, 117 Democratic Review: 97, 181n24 Dennison, William: 148, 160, 206n26 Derby Institute of Fine Arts: 69, 170n23 Derby, Henry: 196n22 Derby, J. C.: 13, 15, 73, 118, 196n19 Despard, C. J.: 180n14 DeWitt and Davenport: 169n15 Dickens, Charles: 108 Dodge, Ossian E.: 144, 201n23 dogs: 59, 61, 63–64, 69, 127, 186n26 Douglas, Stephen A.: 5, 33, 166–67n11, 176n30; supporters of, 49, 143, 194n11; and Young America, 112–14, 147 Dowling, Cornelia: 8, 169n16 Dowling, John: 8, 169n16 Dressler, William: “Perry’s Victory March,” 145 Duganne, A. J. H.: 8, 73, 88, 98; as contributor (Age of Reason, 200n10; America’s Own, 175n18; Daily News, 83, 189n16; Symbol, 188n8); as Sketch Club member, 53, 180n14; works by (“America and Republicanism,” 203n5; Iron Man, 83–84; Knights of the Seal, 83; Tenant House, 50; “The True Republic,” 154, 204n11) Dunn, John: 180n14 Dunnel, William: 16, 65, 180n14; as engraver (Fairy Tales of Many Nations, 95, 96; Portrait of Carlos D. Stuart, 82–83; Proverbial Philosophy, 78; Sunday Dispatch, 78, 135; Washington Monument after Walcutt’s Design, 136, 152) Durand, Asher B.: 43, 85, 98, 176–77n32, 189n20 Durivage, F. A.: 188n8 Dutch Reformed Church: 92, 152, 188n9 Düsseldorf: 196n22; school of art, 45, 46, 88–89, 98, 190n28 Duyckinck, Evert: 137, 169n17, 186n27, 192n42, 197n27 eagle: 18, 35, 36, 193n53; and nativists, 3, 5, 15, 23, 51, 114; and Odd Fellows, 51, 114; and Young America, 18, 84–85, 114, 119 Early Settlers’ Association: 155, 159, 204nn12–14

eclecticism: 38, 69–71, 108, 119–20, 196n22, 199n3; and the Egyptian, 135; and the Gothic, 137; 140; in interior decoration, 71, 199n3 Edmonds, Francis: 98, 171n28, 199n1 Ehninger, John W.: Turkey Shoot, 186n25 Elliott, Charles: 180n14, 187n34 Elliott, Jesse: 142 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: 15 engravers: as artisans, 9, 16, 20, 23, 38, 176– 77n32; collaborations with artists, 9, 12, 38, 45, 129 (on design proposals, 16, 65, 135, 136, 152); collaborations with authors, 8–9, 16, 50, 88, 112, 135, 152; as employed by ­periodicals, 16, 21 (America’s Own, 23, 31, 33, 92; Columbian, 14; Daguerreian Journal, 86; Golden Rule, 23; Republic, 8–9, 20, 23, 33, 51; Sunday Dispatch, 16, 78; Union, 12, 14); as employed by publishers (American Art-­Union, 16; Baker and Scribner, 78; Charles Holden, 9; Edward Walker, 8–9, 14–15, 55, 130, 135, 176n28; Harper & ­Brothers, 92; Israel Post, 171n30; J. C. Derby, 13, 15, 74; Odd Fellows, 12, 55; ­Putnam’s, 95, 100, 193n52; Redfield, 112; ­religious societies, 12, 23); as publishers (F. Leslie, 9; J. McRae, 12, 23, 31, 46, 88, 126; N. Currier, 2, 168n6; T. W. Strong, 2, 20, 31, 46, 115, 168n6) Episcopalians: 49, 71, 119, 175n17, 195–96n18; artists as, 12, 33, 171n28, 199n1; institutions, 28, 152, 173n1; ministers, 33, 51, 71, 80, 158; and nativism, 4, 52 Europe: art of, 9, 71, 108, 188, 199n1; artists trained in, 44, 122, 123, 143, 147; as an ethnicity, 27, 52, 73, 94, 124, 133; immigrants from, 27, 73, 119, 151, 162; as kindred people, 129, 152, 158, 183n34; Protestants in, 33, 42; as unrepublican, 14, 48–49, 66, 105, 124 (as socialist, 31); uprisings in, 49, 82, 123–25, 133, 205n23 Evangelist (New York): 77, 187n1 Evening Mirror (New York): on art, 51–52, 137, 178n1, 181n24 (favored artists, 8–9, 48, 122); contributors to, 8, 84, 181n23, 183n34, 199n3; and nativism, 15, 48, 51, 178n1, 203n5 Evening Post (New York): 26, 173n4, 174n9; art criticism in, 98, 183n37, 195n13; as a Democratic paper, 88, 98 Everett, Edward: 11, 15, 166–67n11, 176n30; on George Washington, 143, 201n21, 153; as presidential candidate, 153, 201n21 Express (New York): 15, 49, 53, 133; on art, 51, 123; writers for, 169n18, 180n14, 189n13

INDEX

fairies: in art, 91–107, 182n28; and demons, 88–91, 94, 114; illustrators of, 91–94, 191n35, 192n43; and nationalism, 94, 103, 112, 114; as nature spirits, 82, 92, 93, 100, 101; as Protestant, 91–92; publishers of, 91–92, 98; tales of, 91–92, 95, 167–68n3, 190–91n32; and women, 92, 100, 148 Fairman, William: 172n43 Fanshawe, Samuel: 180n14 Farrenc, Edmund: 50, 180n14 Father Mathew: 95. See also temperance Faulds, David P.: 7 Female Native American Association. See Washington Female Native American Association Fillmore, Millard: 72, 80, 166–67n11; as nativist candidate, 2, 37, 83–84, 85, 95, 133 firemen: in art, 29, 31, 59–61, 97; as working class, 30, 31, 47, 142, 177n34, 177–78n36 Fisher, J. K.: 179n11 flag, U.S.: as egalitarian, 91, 100, 119, 137, 159; and nativism, 5–6, 10, 15, 23, 126; and print culture, 31, 50, 85, 156; as the “stars and stripes,” 3, 10–11, 15, 21, 51, 137. See also Stars and Stripes Flagg, George: 42 Forrest, Edwin: 24, 30, 61, 192n45 Fosdick, William W.: as nativist, 37, 52, 85, 189n18; in Ohio, 117, 175n17, 178n37; as Sketch Club member, 37, 52, 177–78n36, 180n14 (in Cincinnati, 40); as a western poet, 112, 129, 195n15; works by (Ariel, 50, 92–93, 100, 182n28) Foster, G. G.: 182n28, 188n3, 194–95n12 Foster, Stephen: 143 Fourierism: 80, 188n7, 190n27, 190n31. See also Associationism France: accounts of, 103, 117–21, 125; art and artists in, 57, 65, 77, 100, 135; democratic movements in, 105, 125; immigrants from, 50, 67, 71. See also Paris Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper: on art, 98, 147, 202n30; contributors to, 167–68n3; as Democratic, 147–48, 169n18; distribution of, 177n34, 202n30; illustrators for, 9, 147– 48, 174n9, 180–81n17, 182n28 Frankenstein, Godfrey: 179n8, 195nn16–17 Frankenstein, John: 179n8 fraternal associations: and artisans, 1–4, 16, 30, 35–36, 42–43; and artists’ cooperatives, 43– 44, 45, 47, 91; as crossing class, 1, 30, 132; membership of, 3–4, 50–51, 132, 154; as mutual aid, 3–4, 28, 42, 44, 132, 159; and nativist orders, 1, 3–4, 40, 43; opposition to, 30, 50, 99, 172n36; publications of, 8, 16; rhetoric of

213 brotherhood of, 15, 43, 78–79; and trades unions, 42–43, 129, 154, 204n11. See also Odd Fellows free soil: 4, 190n31. See also antislavery Freeman’s Journal: 191n34 Freemasons: 33, 41; and the arts, 3, 34, 38, 144; membership of, 3, 4, 38, 50, 177n34; symbols, 3, 31, 38, 139 frontiers: and American Indians, 59, 72, 126; and ethnic assimilation, 59, 67, 71, 72–74; and frontiersmen, 54, 56–57, 62, 69; and the native-­born, 71, 76. See also backwoodsman; pioneers Fuller, Jane Gay: 172n34 Fuller, W. J. A.: 169n18 Gates, T. G.: 180n14 Gayler, Charles: 47, 114, 180n14, 194–95n12 Genin, John: 57 genre painting: characteristics of, 93, 191– 92n40; painters of, 44, 46, 48, 54, 87, subjects of (ethnicity, 93–94; historical, 95–97, 176n27; immigrants, 48–49, 199n1; the working class, 35–36, 46, 171n28) George, Henry: 42, 190n27 German idealism: 88, 91, 94, 97 German immigrants: 1, 56, 71, 86, 141; and alcohol, 141, 186n27; and anti-­Catholicism, 2, 94, 141, 160; and antislavery, 49, 141, 160; in art, 48–49; as artists, 2, 16, 33, 47, 181n19; as freethinkers, 5, 141, 151; in the Republican Party, 141, 160 Germany: 16, 33, 41, 196–97n26; democratic uprisings in, 46, 49, 123; folklore of, 94 Giddings, Joshua: 140 Gifford, Sanford: 180n14, 182n26 gift books: 15, 29; contributors to, 8–9, 14–15, 48, 64, 85, 87 Godwin, Parke: as an Associationist, 88, 91, 98, 190n31, 194n11; and democracy movements, 88, 105; as editor (Evening Post, 88, 98; Putnam’s, 98, 202n30); as a transcendentalist, 94, 98; works by (“Church of ­Humanity,” 91; Vala, 98–107, 108, 112, 114, 192n45) Golden Rule (New York): 66, 91–92, 172n36, 188n8; illustrators for, 23, 111; poetry in, 16, 85; works in (“On the Dedication of the Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church,” 16; “Wilfred Montressor,” 111) Goupil & Co.: 57–59, 61, 122, 132, 184n8 Gove, Mary: 80 Grant, Ulysses: 25 Granville, Ohio: 28, 36 Gray, Joseph: 140–41. See also Plain Dealer

214 INDEX Greatorex, Eliza: 47, 177–78n36, 180n14, 181n19 Greece, ancient: 52, 94, 186n26 Greeley, Horace: 80, 82, 88, 117; as editor of the Tribune (New York), 137, 202n30 Green, Fanny: 82, 87, 169n17; “The First Snow Storm,” 87 Greenough, Horatio: 135 Greenwood cemetery (Brooklyn): 28, 29, 148, 174n13, 202n31 Gunn, Thomas Butler: friends of, 192n42; as illustrator (Know-­Nothing Almanac, 20, 172n42; Lantern, 18–20, 97, 172n42, 181n24; Young America, 20, 172n42); work by (“Tableaux of American History,” 18–20, 19, 21) guns: and military preparedness, 32, 56, 63, 128; and the native-­born, 18, 55–56, 64, 69, 199n1; shooting of, 55–56, 67–71, 112, 183– 84n2, 186n25 Habermann, Franz Xaver: 126, 197n31 Hagen, John C.: and associations, 44, 87, 173– 74n5, 180n14; journals that supported, 48, 89, 190n29; poetry of, 87, 93, 190n23; as a ­regionalist, 112, 114; works by (“Ballads of the Revolution,” 88; Foot-­Prints of Truth, 88–91, 89, 90, 100, 101; “Happiest Day of My Life,” 130–31; portrait of F. Chapman, 44, 88; Snow Scene, 87) Hague Street explosion: 28–29 Haight, Gilbert L.: 42 Haight, Joseph: 42 Hamilton, Morris R.: 182–83n33 Hamilton, William: 44 Harmonic Society: 188n9 Harper & Brothers: 28, 169n15, illustrated books of, 9–10, 14, 25, 91–92 Harper, James: 10, 166–67n10 Harper’s Monthly: 41, 174n9 Harper’s Weekly: contributors to, 174n9, 186n25, 202n30; works in (“Public Square at Cleveland, Ohio, with the Perry Statue,” 141, 144, 147–48; “Thanksgiving at a New England Farmhouse,” 9, 11, 194n3) Harris, Thomas Lake: 80, 82, 86, 88 Harrison, William Henry: 33; portrait of, 34, 38, 176n25 Hart, William: 180n14, 181n19 Hasenclever, Johann: 45–46; Studio Scene, 46, 98 hats: 5, 9, 44, 57, 146 Hawkins, Dexter A.: 78 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: 15, 63 Hayne, Robert: 175n17 Headley, Joel T.: as editor (American Metropolitan Magazine, 181n23; Daily News,

189n16); as Odd Fellows contributor, 171n32; writings on (Commodore Perry, 31; Washington, George, 17, 78, 137, 172n40) Healy, G. P. A.: 98, 117–18, Portrait of Henry Clay, 62, 117, 185n16 Herald (Cleveland): 143, 201n19 Herald (New York): 44, 85, 147; art criticism in, 48, 128, 181n22; contributors to, 78, 82, 188n3, 189n13 Herring, Silas C.: 37, 77, 176n31 Hicks, Thomas: 88, 98, 182n26; “Battle of Foul Faiths,” 106; Vala, 106 historical societies: 62, 155, 176n25, 185n16 history of art: 26, 43–44, 174n7, 179n9; and American art, 14–15, 51, 108 history painting: and national origins, 8, 12, 20–21, 31, 72; for a republic, 57, 107, 117–19, 121–28; and religion, 11–12, 91; specialists in, 11–12, 16, 42, 44, 179n11 (in Europe, 46, 57, 98, 117–18, 190n28); state-­sponsored, 12, 42, 119, 139; studies of, 9, 88, 159; styles of, 16–21, 99, 109, 130, 137 Hitchcock, DeWitt Clinton: 180n14, 180– 81n17, 194–95n12 Hoffman, Charles Fenno: 185n20 Holden, Charles: 8, 9, 169n14 Holden’s Dollar Magazine: 8–9, 11, 85, 98, 138; contributors to, 8–9, 85, 98, 182n26; editors of, 8, 11, 169n17 Holmes, R. D.: 180n14 Home Journal: 117 Hoover, Herbert: 156 Horton, Tudor: 192n42; as engraver for (America’s Own; 32, 33; Moneypenny, 193n1) Houdon, Jean-­A ntoine: 98 Houston, Samuel: 44, 50, 166–67n11, 176n30 Howland, William: as engraver for (American Tract Society, 173n1; Fairy Tales of Many Nations, 191n39; Foot-­Prints of Truth, 193n52; Harper & Brothers, 92; Republic, 23, 24; Vala, 95, 100, 105) Hoyt, George: 112, 146 Hubbard, R. W.: 182n26 Huber, Konrad: 112, 180n14, 181n19 Hudson River School: xiii–xiv Hughes, John: 177–78n36 Humanitarian Society: 180n15 Humphrey, Samuel Dwight: 178n39 Hungary: 48, 49, 50, 123. See also Kossuth, Louis Hunt, Mary Rice: 204n13 Huntington, Daniel: and artists’ associations, 43; as a religious painter, 11–12, 15, 77, 92, 99; works by (The Republican Court in the

INDEX

Time of Washington, 170n23; Washington and His Generals, 172n40) Huntington, Jedidiah: 97 Ide, Harriet Jewett: 148 Ide, William: 148 Illustrated American News (New York): 20, 114, 169n17, 172n43, 189n16, 194–95n12 illustration: market for, 14, 16, 21; style of 55, 89, 94, 110–11, 130; subjects, 67, 91–92, 173n2, 186n25 immigration: 42, 151–52, 154, 156–58, 161–62; and assimilation, 71, 158, 172n36; and democracy, 56, 71–73; legislation on, 151, 152, 158, 161, 203n1 Improved Order of Red Men: 50, 51, 182n29 Independent (New York): 52, 183n37 Inman, Henry: 177–78n36 Inman, John: 171n30 Inness, George: 42 Ireland: as birthplace, 28, 47, 51, 71, 147, 173n1; uprisings in, 49–50, 51, 91, 117, 173–74n5. See also Irish immigrants Irish immigrants: and alcohol, 24, 67, 71, 95, 186n27; in art, 20, 47–49, 67, 71, 111; as artists, 47, 57, 147, 195n16, 198n34 (engravers, 23; illustrators 192n43; patrons of, 119); as nationalists 45, 49, 133 (as editors, 18, 48, 49, 181n24; as Protestant, 18, 47, 51); in Ohio, 43, 140 155, 160; political influence of, 5, 141, 173n3; presses, 30, 49, 147–48, 181n24, 202n29; and Protestant elites, 49, 182–83n33; as working class, 1, 24, 28, 48–49, 140–41 Irish News: 181n24 Iron Man: 83, 84 Iroquois: 72–73 Island City: 8, 169n14 Italy: in fiction, 94, 97; immigrants from, 199n1, 204–5n17; and sculpture, 147, 149, 199n1; uprisings in, 49, 105, 117, 125 Jackson, Andrew: 146, 197–98n33 Jardin des Plantes: 62–63 Jenkins, Warren: 33, 175n22 Jews: 25–26, 65, 132, 142; and anti-­Semitism, 133, 197–98n33; Jewish presses, 88, 158 John Mohegan: 69, 71, 72, 74–76. See also Cooper, James Fenimore: Pioneers Johnson, Finley: 174–75n16 Jones, Thomas: 145, 155 Jones, Thomas D.: as art association member, 40, 44, 45–46, 117, 180n14; career of, 36, 175n17, 176n29 (in Ohio, 36, 40, 67, 117, 139); portrait busts by, 140, 176n31, 176– 77n32; works by (design for Commodore

215 Perry monument, 139–40, 144; Henry Clay Medal, 37–38; portrait of C. C. Wright, 37–38; portrait of George Law, 85, 114–15, 195n13) Judah, Uriah H.: 25, 169n17, 173–74n5 Judge Temple: 69–70, 75. See also Cooper, James Fenimore: Pioneers Judson, Edward Z. C. See Buntline, Ned June, Jennie (J. C. Croly): 133, 199n41 Kansas-­Nebraska Act: 114, 127, 133. See also popular sovereignty Kensett, John: 182n26 Kenton, Simon: 31, 57–65, 76, 203n5; pictures of, 59–64, 118, 133, 145, 185n16; statues of, 59, 184–85n11, 195n16 Kentucky Historical Society: 61–62, 176n25, 185n16 Kentucky: and Ohio, 28, 30, 36; politicians from, 36, 174n11; as the west, 56, 59, 61, 67, 118; King George III, statue of: 8, 12, 31, 124, 126, 198n40 Kingsland, Ambrose: 182n26 Kirkland, Caroline: 14 Knickerbocker: 14, 166n9, 187n34, 190n26; contributors to, 25, 41, 188n8 Knowlton, E. G.: 144 Knowlton, Jonathan M.: 78, 144 Know-­Nothing Party: and American Indians, 72–74, 76; as antislavery, 4, 127, 141, 154 (and the Republican Party, 5–6, 135, 141, 147, 160–61); and Compromise with the South, 10–11, 36–37, 49, 176n30; cult of George Washington, 15, 16, 135 (and his Farewell Address, 15, 37, 152, 170n23); demise of, 66, 151, 159; and the Democratic Party, 5, 6, 135, 141; electoral successes of (in 1854–55, 7, 76, 113, 127 [in Ohio, 160–61]; in 1844, 160); on immigrants, 5, 7, 77, 141, 151; leaders of (congressmen, 23, 72, 133; gubernatorial candidates, 4, 7, 83, 168–69n12; mayoral candidates, 31, 179n7, 189n18; state legislators, 83; in Ohio, 160, 206n26); membership of, 1–4, 36, 43, 167n2 (as conservative Whigs, 1, 6, 20, 36–37, 176n25, 202n30; as ­exclusive, 4, 25–26, 132); platforms, 4–6, 16, 43–44, 77, 152 (aimed at Catholics, 4, 24, 31, 77, 160–61); presidential candidates (M. Fillmore, 2, 37, 72, 83, 85, 95; G. Law, 37, 52, 85, 114, 167–68n3); presses, 20 (America’s Own, 30–31; New Haven Palladium, 100, 193n50; Sunday Dispatch, 95); promotion of native-­born genius, 21, 52, 107, 139; relationship to fraternal associations, 1–4, 15, 40, 43,

216 INDEX Know-­Nothing Party (continued) 132 (as a brotherhood, 4–7, 73); symbolism of, 10, 15, 21, 72, 113 (Signing of the Declaration of Independence, 27, 168n6); as a third party, 3, 67; works about (Know-­Nothing Almanac, 20, 24, 46, 172n42; “Old Abe’s Address to the Wide Awakes,” 5, 52, 53; “Sam the Know-­Nothing,” 78; “True American Citizen,” 31, 152; Uncle Sam’s Youngest Son: Citizen Know Nothing, 5–6, 10, 37; Voice to America, 8; “A Wide Awake!,” 5–6; Wide-­ Awake Gift, 15; Young Sam, 3, 98). See also nativist parties; Wide Awakes Kossuth, Louis: artists who supported, 50, 57, 100, 125, 182n26, 190n23; as liberator, 48, 88, 117, 123–24 Krimmel, John Lewis: 176n28 Kyle, Joseph: 65, 92, 180nn14,16, 182n26 Kyle, Mary. See Dallas, Mary Kyle Ladies’ Repository: 171n33 Lafayette College: 159 Lafever, Minard: 135–36, 152 land reform: 14, 30–31, 82, 138, 200n10 Lang, Louis: 182n26 Lantern (New York): 30, 180n14; contributors to, 97, 167–68n3, 172n42, 181n24, 194–95n12; works in (“Tableaux of American History,” 18–19) Law, George: 37, 52, 85, 167–68n3, 189n18; portraits of, 114–15 Leader (Cleveland): 142–43, 146–47, 155 Leatherstocking: 69–72, 74–76, 186n26. See also Cooper, James Fenimore: Pioneers Leeds, Agnes: 25, 28, 33, 174n13. See also Walcutt, Agnes Leslie, Frank: 9, 182n28. See also Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper Lessing, Karl Friedrich: 46, 190n28 Lester, Charles Edward: as a contributor (American Metropolitan Magazine, 181n23; Herald of the Union, 188n3; Odd Fellows’ annuals, 14–15, 80, 130; Photographic Art Journal, 179n11; Republic, 80); as a diplomat, 14, 179n7; works by (Artists of America, 15, 78, 171n32, 192–93n48; Jesuits in Our Homes, 50; Life of Sam Houston, 50, 188n3) Leutze, Emanuel: as a historical painter, 15, 16–19, 42, 182n26; works by (Attainder of Strafford, 178n1; Columbus Before the Queen [1843], 18, 172n41; Landing of the Northmen, 193n53; Storming of the Teocalli, 18, 172n41; Washington Crossing the Delaware, 16–17, 41, 42, 172n37)

liberty: allegories of, 15, 50, 51, 100, 106 (with cap, 23, 33; tree, 82); pole, 84, 126; republican, 7, 30, 31, 139; and slavery 100, 106; sons of, 12, 126, 132 Lincoln, Abraham: elegy for, 189n12; portrayals of, 36, 140, 143–44; as presidential candidate, 5, 6, 141, 147 Lind, Jenny: 98, 100–107, 167–68n3, 194–95n12 Lippard, George: 91, 165n3, 174–75n16, 175n18 Literary World: 89, 197n27 Lockwood, Rembrandt: career of, 30, 33, 173– 74n5, 196–97n26; works by (Genevieve, 52; Last Judgment, 51–52, 182n32, 182–83n33, 183nn37–38 (founding fathers in, 99, 119, 137) London: 56, 142, 205–6n24 Lossing, Benson: career of, 8–9, 51, 72, 174– 75n16, 192n42; as contributor (Adventures in Fairy-­L and, 92; American Tract Society, 12; History of Romanism, 8; Know-­Nothing Almanac, 24, 172n42; Odd Fellows’ gift books, 8–9, 14, 171n32; Republic, 8–9, 23–25); as editor, 173n1, 173–74n5; nativism of, 14, 23–25, 173n3; works by (“Grandfather Knickerbocker,” 132, 171n32; History of the Fine Arts, 17, 108; “Kissing the Pope’s Toe,” 24–25; “Mount Vernon As It Is,” 172n40; “Perry Statue,” Pictorial Field-­Book of the War of 1812, 141, 144, 173n3; Pictorial Field-­ Book of the Revolution, 17, 25; Seventeen Hundred and Seventy-­Six, 8, 14) Louvre: 61–62, 117, 118 Ludlow, Fitz Hugh: 80 Lyon, Caleb: 78, 188n3 Madison, Dolley: 130 Magoon, Elias: 174–75n16, 205n23 Manning, E. S.: 174–75n16 Marat, Jean-­Paul: 121 Marble, Dan: 57, 184n7. See also Sam Patch Marion, General Francis: 109, 110, 111, 194n3 Marquis de Lafayette: 11, 31, 100, 159 Masons. See Freemasons Massachusetts: 28, 36, 130, 176n31 Mathews, Cornelius: on art, 108, 114, 139, 200n9; as co-­editor, 137 (Holden’s, 169n17; Literary World, 197n27; Yankee Doodle, 194–95n12); as cultural nationalist, 79, 107, 108, 192n42, 194n3; and nativism, 50, 52, 79, 107, 108; and the Sketch Club, 45, 50, 52, 169n17, 180n14; works by (Chanticleer, 11, 108–12, 113–14; Indian Fairy Book, 92, 112; Moneypenny, 193n1; Witchcraft, 172n35) Matteson, Tompkins: career of, 12–16, 76, 189n16 (and the American Art-­Union, 13,

INDEX

15–16, 170–71n27, 171n28, 199n1; as a historical painter, 12, 15, 72; and print dealers, 12, 122; style of, 18, 55, 73, 76, 130); contributor to (American Metropolitan Magazine, 181n23; Columbian, 14, 171n30, 173–74n5; Golden Rule, 73, 111; National Press, 12; Odd Fellows’ gift books, 14 [American Odd-­ Fellows’ Museum, 55, 64–65, 129–30; Odd-­ Fellows’ Offering, 14, 171n31 and 32]; Sun, 14; Union, 12, 14, 94, 171n30, 173–74n5; Wide-­Awake Gift, 15); works by (“Elizabeth Zane,” 129, 130; First Prayer in Congress, 170–71n27; First Sabbath of the Pilgrims, 12, 171n28; “Last of Their Race,” 55, 64–65, 74, 185n20; Pilgrim Fathers on the Deck of the Mayflower, 12; Signing the Contract on Board the Mayflower, 12; Sugaring Off, 13; Spirit of ’76, 12–15, 13, 171nn30,31, 171–72n33, 172n34; Turkey Shoot, 74–76, 75; Union Portrait, 176n30; Washington Delivering His Inaugural Address, 170–71n27; “Wilfred Montressor,” 111, “The Witch,” 15, 172n35) Maurer, Louis: 2 Maximilian of Wied: 61 May, Edward H.: 92, 117–18, 180n14 Mazeppa, Ivan: pictures of, 57–62, 122, 185n12 (for Mazeppa Hose Company, 59–61, 185n13); poem about, 57; stage play about, 59, 61, 173–74n5; as Ukrainian folk hero, 57, 59–61 McLenan, John: career of, 46–47, 114–17, 172n42, 180n14; as illustrator (Illustrated American News, 194–95n12, Indian Fairy Book, 92, Young America, 114–16, 115) McRae, John: career of, 12, 14, 17, 88; as engraver for (Odd Fellows’ gift books, 12, 14– 15, 55–56; Union, 12); works by (“Elizabeth Zane,” 129, 130; “First Reading of the English Bible,” 14–15, 176n28; Foot-­Prints of Truth, 88, 89, 90, 101; “Joel Wetsel,” 55; Perils of Our Forefathers, 10, 12; Pulling Down the Statue, 126, 133; Sons of Liberty, 88, 126; “Village Politicians,” 171n32) Meagher, Thomas F.: 48–49, 181n24 mechanic’s banks: 13, 33, 66, 171n28 mechanic’s fairs: 38, 61, 128 mechanical inventions: 78, 86, 139; and artists, 36, 38–39, 176n29, 197n32, 202n31 mechanics: 1, 127, 174–75n16; and artists, 86, 147, 174n97, 197n31. See also artisans Menken, Adah Isaacs: 59, 184n9 Merrick, J. B.: 140 Mesmerism: 80, 92. See also spiritualism Methodist Sunday School Union: 29 Methodists: 47, 80, 192n43, 204n14

217 Mexico: 14, 19, 34 Miller, Charles Grant: 184–85n11 Millet, Jean-­François: 57–61, 120; Mazeppa Américain, 57–62, 58, 64, 122, 184n8 Mills, Clark: 146–47 minstrelsy: 7, 76, 107, 143 Mirror (New York): 8, 138, 188n8 Mitchel, John: 49, 180n14 Mohegans: 59 Morand, Augustus: 85–86, 189n21 Moriarty, Albert: “Mazeppa,” 185n13 Morning Telegraph (New York): 94 Morris, George P.: as contributor (Copway’s American Indian, 72; Holden’s, 8, Odd Fellows’ gift books, 14; Sunday Times, 133); and Democrats, 6, 14, 16, 133, 173–74n5 (Plain Dealer, 6, 143, 201n21); as editor, 8, 9, 189n21 (Evening Mirror, 8, 181n23; Home Journal, 117; Mirror, 8, 188n8; National Press, 12; New Mirror, 16); as poet, 14, 73, 98, 143, 174n10 (Few Days, 6–8, 7) Morse, Samuel F. B.: art of, 11–12, 139, 200n9; as art teacher, 11–12, 98, 178n39; as inventor, 11, 78, 139; and Lafayette, 11, 31, 100; and the National Academy of Design, 166–67n11; and nativist parties, 11, 16, 71, 166–67n11; and Vassar, 174–75n16 Mount Vernon Ladies Association: 152, 153 Mount Vernon, New York: 150, 167n12, 177–78n36 Mount Vernon: 15, 100, 139, 168n6; campaign to save, 152, 153, 172n40, 201n21 Mount, William Sidney: 194n7 Murillo: 118 Musical Times: 85–86, 189n21 Musical World: 85–86 Napoleon, Louis: 121, 125 Nast, Thomas: 11 National Academy of Design: and other art associations, 16, 41, 43; and artisans, 38, 41, 176–77n32; as artist-­run, 9, 43, 166–67n11, 178n2, 189n20; as exclusive, 9, 20–21, 41, 189n20; exhibitions of, 44, 128, 187n39 National Democrat: 82 Native American Party: 4, 108, 199n1. See also Know-­Nothing Party; nativist parties nativism: as aimed at the Catholic Church, 49, 77, 143; as aimed at immigrants, 5, 12, 24–25, 51, 108 (Catholic, 4–7, 26–27, 31, 51; Irish and Germans, 5, 71, 141); as a brotherhood, 3–5, 30, 40, 50–51, 129 (and American Indians, 50, 72–74, 76, 126; of the native-­born, 25, 43– 44, 52, 91, 134); after the Civil War, 151, 152; and cult of George Washington, 11, 15, 16–17,

218 INDEX nativism (continued) 37, 100; economic causes of, 1–3, 30–31, 40, 66, 165n2, 167n2; popularity of, 7, 13, 16; presses, 36, 92, 203n5; and reform movements, 30–31, 77–78, 79; religious role in, 26–27, 42, 51, 77–78, 165n2; and republican ideology, 1, 4–5, 14, 134, 152; in the Republican Party, 5, 140, 143, 160, 162; rhetoric of (American nature, 8, 54; foreign influence, 15, 37; international democracy, 51, 57, 129; national origins, 8, 31, 100, 114, 123; opposition to tyranny, 9, 12, 49, 126, 141; the pope, 23–24, 126; Protestant custom, 9, 11, 108); and slavery, 4, 30, 51, 72, 127; and women, 130, 172n34 nativist parties: and artisans, 23, 30–31, 43; rhetoric of, 6–7, 12–13, 14, 172n34; as a third party, 3, 13, 15, 36, 66–67, 114 Natty Bumppo. See Leatherstocking nature: allegorized, 56, 61, 62–63, 73, 90; as anti-­commercial, 40, 56, 69; and artists, 85– 86; as republican, 56–57, 68, 130, 138, 199n1 neoclassicism: and the American Revolution, 34, 137–38; and eclecticism, 71, 79–80, 117– 20, 136–39; in the eighteenth century, 122, 124, 132, 151–52; and the Enlightenment, 39, 99, 136, 144–45, 197–98n33 (and universal ideals, 29, 91, 106–7, 148–49); as French, 59, 62, 78; versus the Gothic, 137–38; versus modern realism, 46, 121–22, 150, 199n1 New England: as antislavery, 27, 88, 111, 140, 159; art depicting, 9, 11, 13, 100, 105–6, 112; artists from, 11, 23, 44, 88, 98, 197n32 (in the Sketch Club, 47); as Protestant, 9, 11, 27, 67, 100, 109; writers from, 23, 27, 143 New Mirror (New York): 16 New York City: capitalism in, 42; as center for art (associations for, 39–40, 44; dealers in, 5, 9, 69 177–78n36; patrons, 36, 41, 119, 142; teachers of, 11, 38); as a center for nativism, 1, 4, 11, 26–27, 152, 160; customs house, 26, 150, 182–83n33; as diverse, 11, 26, 47; elections in, 7, 108, 160; as patron of the arts, 11, 17, 138, 182n26; political meetings in, 36, 49; public art in, 124, 132, 135–39, 142; as publishing center, 8, 9–10, 108; support for the poor, 28 New York Observer: 11, 172n36 New York Sketch Club: art of, 26, 92–93, 112, 149, 181n18 (style of, 47–49, 108, 114–16); collaborations of, 16, 37, 50, 83, 167–68n3; engravers, illustrators, and scene painters, 45, 65, 92; immigrants, 47, 56, 181n19; list of members, 180n14; membership as including (Catholics, 47, 49, 181n24; as a mutual

benefit association, 40, 44–47, 52–53, 180n15; as exclusionary, 47, 51); versus (Knickerbocker) Sketch Club, 40, 44–45; papers supporting, 30, 51, 132, 148, 169n15, 172n43; politics of, 47–50, 51–53, 88, 141, 182n26; women, 47, 51, 132 New York Times: 114–15, 182n26 Newport, Rhode Island: 144 New-­Yorker: 40, 84, 172n43 Nineteenth Century (New York): 84 Noah, M. M.: 25, 132, 173–74n5 Noble, Thomas Satterwhite: 177–78n36 North, the: 87, 101, 105–7; 112 O’Brien, John: 147–48 Odd Fellows Hall: in Cleveland, 143; in Columbus, 148; in New York, 136, 199n3 Odd Fellows: art for, 34–35, 38 (style of, 84–85, 111, 130); and artisan culture, 34–37, 40, 42– 44, 80; as a benevolent association, 3–5, 28, 40, 44; engravers for (B. Lossing, 8, 14, 23, 132, 171n32; J. McRae, 12, 14, 15, 55; J. Orr, 100; N. Orr, 23; H. Sadd, 171n31); as exclusionary (African Americans, 4, 50, 143, 182n29; women, 15, 50–51, 89, 130, 132); illustrators for, 43, 89 (C. Blauvelt, 48; T. Matteson, 12–15, 55, 64–65, 73, 130, 171n32; E. May 117; Stearns, 15, 130–31; J. Talbot, 78; Walcutt, 14, 54–55); membership, 3–4, 28 (artists, 51, 87, 169n18; editors, 16, 38, 43, 51, 177n34; politicians, 10, 31, 43, 50, 80, 83; writers, 64, 83, 182n28, 188n9); newspapers of, 111, 114 (American Odd Fellow, 173n1; Golden Rule, 16, 23, 66, 85, 91–92; Symbol, 80, 176n31, 188n8); as Protestant, 43, 50–51, 172n36; publications of, 52 (annual gift books, 8–9, 35, 48, 85, 87, 132; American Odd-­Fellows’ Museum, 8, 16; Odd-­Fellows’ Offering, 14, 130); publishers for, 8, 10, 14, 82, 169n14, 198n40; and reform, 35–36, 80, 87, 200n10; as a republican brotherhood, 50–51, 84–85, 100; writers for, 85, 132 (N. Buntline, 171n32; L. G. Clark, 14, 99; F. Green, 82, 87; J. C. Hagen, 87, 130–31; J. Headley, 171n32; U. Judah, 173–74n5; C. E. Lester, 14–15, 50, 78, 80, 130; G. Morris, 14; M. M. Noah, 132; F. Ottarson, 185n20; F. Saunders, 8; C. Stuart, 8–9, 14, 50, 84–85; Wight, 85). See also fraternal associations Odd-­Fellows’ Offering: contributors to, 14–15, 48, 171n32, 173–74n5; editors and publishers of, 14–15; “Happiest Day of My Life,” 130– 31; “Joel Wetsel,” 55; “Last of Their Race,” 185n20; “Marriage of Washington,” 130–31; Sunday Morning, 176–77n32; “The Witch,”

INDEX

15, 172n35; works in (“First Reading of the English Bible,” 14–15; “The First Ship,” 64; “Freedom’s Holy Cause,” 14, 171n31 Oertel, Johannes: career of, 177–78n36, 196– 97n26 and 27; works by (Adventures in Fairy-­L and, illustrations in, 92; America’s Own mastheads, 32–33, 92; Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, 123–26, 124, 132; 197n31, 198n40) Ohio Mechanics Institute: 128 Ohio State Journal (Columbus): 200n11, 201n22, 205n22, 206n26 Ohio: in art, 35, 118; art in, 37, 43, 139–49, 155– 56, 202n31 (the Capitol, 38, 59, 195n13, 202– 3n33; museums and exhibitions, 38, 128, 145, 177nn33,34;); art associations in, 40, 98, 146, 196n19; artists from, 44, 114, 177–78n36, 184n11 (Sketch Club members from 30, 37, 44–47, 180n14); artists in, 11, 33–34, 98, 117, 195n16; Democratic politics in, 140–43; editors from 30, 47, 88; and New York, 42, 98, 118, 175n17, 179n8; Odd Fellows in, 43; politicians, 59, 62–63, 117, 148 (in fiction, 109, 111); Republican politics in, 139–43, 154, 156, 159– 61, 204n8; schools in, 28, 142; as the west, 31, 43, 54, 57, 59; Western Reserve of, 140, 155; Whig politics in, 33–34, 37, 176n25; writers from 37, 88, 117. See also specific cities Order of the American Star. See Wide Awakes Order of the Star Spangled Banner: 3, 10 Order of United American Mechanics: 3, 4, 30–31, 51, 161–62 Order of United Americans: as a fraternal order, 1–4, 40, 50–51, 161–62; and the Know-­ Nothing Party, 1, 4, 6–7, 24, 77; leaders of, 189n13; membership of, 1–4 (African Americans, 50; artisans, 30; artists, 24, 152; women 50–51, 192n42); publications of, 4, 43 (Republic, 8, 23–26, 36); republican ideology of, 53, 84–85, 159; symbols of, 10, 12, 23, 85, 114 (George Washington, 12, 16, 133, 135); and temperance, 42; works about (The United American, 1–4, 2, 10, 12, 167n1; Few Days, 6–7). See also Republic Orr, John W.: career of, 23, 45, 92, 169n17, 173n1; engraver for (Campfires of the Red Men, 74; Chanticleer, 109, 110; Fairy Tales of Many Nations, 191n39; Foot-­Prints of Truth, 193n52; Golden Rule, 111; panorama of the Hudson, 65; Vala, 100, 101, 102, 193n52; “The Washington Memorial,” 152–53); as Odd Fellow, 23, 100 Orr, Nathaniel: career of, 23, 45, 92, 173n1 (Mrs. Orr, 51); engraver for (American Tract Society, 23; Daguerreian Journal, 86; design

219 for a monument to George Washington, 135; Fairy Tales of Many Nations, 191n39; Golden Rule, 23; Life of Sam Houston, 50; Republic, 23–24); as Odd Fellow, 51 Orton, Jason Rockwood: 81–82, 189n12; Campfires of the Red Men, 72–74, 76, 81, 91, 187n38 and 39 Otis, James F.: 180n14 Ottarson, Franklin J.: 64, 185n20 outline drawings: 97–98, 192n43 Panton, Francis: 180n14 Paris: 56, 61, 70; in art, 62–63, 117–21; artists in, 38, 62, 98–99, 117–18; exhibitions in, 38, 118; print publishers, 197n31 Parmly, Eleazar: 193n50 patents: 36, 38–39, 65, 86 Peck, George: 174n15 Perry, Aaron F.: 159–60, 177–78n36, 205n22 (Mrs. Perry, 160) Perry, Enoch Wood: The True American, 165–66n5 Perry, James DeWolf: 158 Perry, Oliver Hazard: family of, 142, 156, 158; monuments to, 135, 139–50, 151, 155; victory of, 31, 61, 155, 195n13; as Whig hero, 142 Petit & Pheiffer Gallery: 180n14 Pfaff’s: 45 Phoenix (New York): 147 Photographic Art Journal: 169n14, 179n11 photography: 85, 86, 144, 169n14; as fine art, 86, 174n7, 178n39 Piatt, Donn: and artists, 189n19, 196n22 (in Ohio, 59, 88, 184–85n11, 195n15, 16 and 17; in Paris, 88, 118); in Bell Smith Abroad, 62–63, 118; career of, 118, 120, 159, 184–85n11, 204n16 (as attaché, 63, 117); and international revolution, 117, 120–21, 195n14; at Mac-­A- ­Cheek Press, 143, 195n15, 201n20; in Ohio politics, 59 (as antislavery Democrat, 63, 126; as a Republican, 117, 140, 143, 154); and spiritualism, 190n26; and the working class, 88, 190n27 Piatt, Ella Kirby: 118, 189n19, 195–96n18 Piatt, Louise: Bell Smith Abroad, 117–21, 195n15 (illustrations for, 62, 117, 118) Picton, Thomas: 192n42 Pierce, Franklin: 117, 156 Pierson, Arthur T.: 78 Pilgrims: as ancestors, 15, 23, 63, 170n26; in art, 12, 18, 19; and pilgrimages, 166n9. See also Puritans Pilot (Boston): 147, 202n29 pioneers: as artisans, 56–57, 61, 69, 119; as native-­born, 31, 54, 59, 108, 185n19

220 INDEX Pitcher, Molly: 128–30, 198n34 Plain Dealer (Cleveland): correspondents for, 146, 201n21; as a Democratic paper, 112–13, 114, 140–42, 146–47 (as conservative, 5, 6, 114; and Young America, 33, 113, 143); editors of, 93, 140, 143, 155, 184–85n11; and nativism, 5–6, 141; and Walcutt, 5, 33, 93, 112, 142–47; works in (“The House that Jack Built,” 113; “A Wide Awake,” 5–6) Poland: 49, 61 Polk, James: 34, 160 Pope, Charles: 180n14, 181n19 popular sovereignty: 33, 49, 127, 143, 175n25; and nativism, 133–34 Populism: 66, 159, 162, 205n20 Porter, Rufus: 197n32 Post, Israel: 171n30, 173n5 Poussin: 78 Powell, Thomas: 167–68n3, 180–81n17 Powell, William: Perry’s Victory at the Battle of Lake Erie, 195n13, 202–3n33; portrait of George Law, 114–15, 180n14 Powers, Hiram: 143, 144, 147, 195nn15,16; Greek Slave, 196n22 Pray, Isaac: 82, 189n13 Pre-­R aphaelites: 85–86, 87 Presbyterians: artists and poets, 11, 28, 129; churches, 16, 28 144, 155, 187n1; ministers, 26, 28, 52, 80, 146, 187n1; and New England, 67; publishers, 27; and reform, 28, 117, 146, 187n1; schools, 28, 159 print culture: 8–9, 16, 23, 91–92, 165–66n5; as inexpensive, 6, 8, 16, 29–30; as popular, 16, 109–10, 159, 168n6, 177n34 printers: 8, 9, 28, 80, 171n29; and True Sun, 194n11 Progressive Era: 152, 158, 162, 204–5n17 Protestant art: themes of, 9–10, 15, 78 (allegories, 92; apotheosis, 28–30, 139; fairies, 91; forefathers, 9–10, 55–56; history, 11–12, 14–15, 100, 152; international liberation, 51–52, 124–25, 166n6; martyrs, 89; religious custom, 11, 112, 130) Protestant institutions: cemeteries, 29, 91, 174n15; churches, 28, 121, 140, 153, 156; evangelical schools, 28, 142; societies, 12, 43, 78, 148, 159, 173n1, 174n10 Protestant ministers: 77, 80, 85, 165n2; and the arts, 51–52, 82, 174n15, 182–83n33 (in art clubs, 26, 146); as artists, 33; as artists’ relatives, 41, 47, 92, 97 (and as authors’ relatives, 80, 191n35); as patrons, 29, 174–75n16, 205n23; in civic life, 142, 146, 155, 159; as editors, 80, 172n36, 176n31; in fiction, 71; as historians, 8, 31, 78, 171n32; and missionaries,

72, 78; as patrons, 29, 174–75n16, 205n23; in politics, 26–27, 95; and spiritualism, 80, 82, 86 Protestant presses: 135 (America’s Own, 30, 33; Christian Advocate, 78; Christian Inquirer, 89, 190n29; Copway’s American Indian, 72; Cosmopolitan Art Journal, 48–49; Evangelist, 187n1; Golden Rule, 16; Harper’s Weekly, 148; Sunday Dispatch, 95; Tribune, 12) Protestants: as a brotherhood, 5, 51–52, 78–79, 84, 183n34 (Anglo-­Saxon, 5, 57, 80; in fraternal associations, 43, 50; international, 49, 50, 159; with women, 130); as a Christian ­republic, 14, 66–67, 73, 137, 154 (with the Catholic Church, 49, 51, 71, 78–79, 141, 154; with slavery, 28, 33, 80, 146, 166–67n11; as socialist, 31, 80, 190n27; with temperance, 26–27, 35–36, 42, 80, 95, 112, unified, 113–14); and civic life, 4–5, 11, 27–28, 68, 200n12; in Europe, 33, 42, 61, 121; and fanaticism, 15, 89, 200n10; forefathers of, 9–10, 14–15, 54– 56, 124, 159; and millennialism, 82, 91, 192n45 Providence, Rhode Island: 155, 156 publishers: 91–93, 112, 152; and American art, 9, 12, 95, 196nn19,22; and engravers, 8–9, 10, 14, 173n1; and illustrators, 27, 73, 82, 181n18; and poets, 78, 129, 152; and politics, 2, 15, 171n30, 173–74n5 Puritans: 9–10, 30, 100, 108, 193n50. See also New England; Pilgrims Putnam, George P.: 98, 100 Putnam’s Magazine: 98, 202n30 Quakers: 17, 28, 67, 70 race, American: 52, 62–63, 64, 72 Ransom, Alexander: 180n14 Ransom, Joseph: 78 Rayner, R. J.: 182n26 Read, Thomas Buchanan: 177–78n36, 195n16 Realism: as American, 119, 199n1, 201n24; as conservative, 20, 120, 147; as French, 57; and idealism, 29, 31, 85–86, 90; versus neoclassicism, 59, 78, 119–20, 150; as working class, 90–91, 98 Redfield, Justus: 82, 112, 173n1, 181n24, 194n4 Redin, William H.: 180n14 Redpath, James: 30, 175n19 reform, humanitarian: 20, 47, 53, 84, 180n15; and art, 77, 87–91, 106 regionalism: 105, 112 religious art: and nature, 92; and republican ideology, 51–52, 183n38; and women, 47, 118, 148

INDEX

Renwick, James: 138 Republic: and American Indians, 48, 56, 72; art criticism in, 9, 41–42, 51–52, 173–74n5; contributors to, 52, 169n15, 184n7 (F. Green, 169n17; U. Judah, 25–26, 169n17, 173n5; J. M. Knowlton, 78, 144; C. E. Lester, 80; M. M. Noah, 25, 132; A. Snelling, 169n14; C. D. Stuart, 8–9, 10, 25, 50, 52, 85); William Walcutt, 8–9, 23, 25, 36, 54 (on art, 52, 85; histories of the Revolution, 25, 54, 72, 126, 132; and the War of 1812, 56, 69, 132, 142, 143; “Joel Wetsel,” 54–56); editor of, 23, 48, 72, 114, 132; engravers for (T. Horton, 33; W. Howland, 23–24; B. Lossing, 8–9, 23–25; J. Orr, 23, 169n17; N. Orr, 23, 51); illustrations in, 23–25, 72; on C. Mathews; 11, 112; as organ of the United Americans, 8, 36, 49, 159 Republican Party: absorption of nativists, 5, 49, 140, 159–61; and antislavery Democrats, 27, 113, 117, 160; and elections, 5, 26–27, 112– 13, 140–41, 156–58; as a fusion party, 140, 141, 147, 151, 160–61; and immigrants, 5, 26– 27, 141; and imperialism, 162; officials of, 34, 155–56, 205n21; as party of abolition, 5, 27, 71, 134, 154; as party of war, 49, 147, 181n22; patronage of, 139–41, 143, 156–58, 204–5n17; policies, 5, 66, 151, 159; presses, 114, 143, 147, 200n11; and religion, 155–58; as sectional, 10–11, 26, 49, 76, 147 Retzch, Moritz: 97 Revolutionary War: African Americans in, 4, 34, 112, 126–27; as Anglo-­A merican bond, 4, 31, 125, 142–43, 194n3; artisans and, 12, 17, 61, 121–34, 138; as crossing-­class, 4, 70, 125–27, 130; as defining citizenship, 8, 72, 74, 124–26, 133; histories of, 8, 17, 25, 184–85n11, 201n24; and immigrants, 25, 47–48, 155, 158, 199n1; as lineage, 25, 36, 85, 158, 172n37; as model for revolutions, 44, 51, 61, 123–26, 162; and national unity, 4, 27, 108–9, 142–43, 203n3; as nativist legacy, 6, 12, 16, 85, 123; as portrayed in art, 4, 20, 54, 122–34 (pictures of, 3, 88, 109, 121–34, 159; pictures of generals, 4, 11, 16–17, 194n3); as Protestant, 17, 108–9, 126; women and, 16–17, 125, 127–32, 155 Reynolds, Joshua: 98 Rhode Island Perry Monument Commission: The Unveiling of the Statue of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, 156–58, 157 Rhode Island: 126, 156–58, 204n16. See also Providence Rice, Harvey: 142, 155, 204n13 Richards, T. Addison: career of, 41, 48, 178n2; as Sketch Club member, 41, 176–77n32, 180n14, 182n26

221 Ritter, Luke: 160–61 Robinson, William E.: 181n24, 182–83n33 Rogers, George: 51, 183n34 Rome: artists in, 42, 97, 98; as home to the Vatican, 24, 33, 49; “Rome,” 50, 66. See also anti-­Romanism Roosevelt, Theodore: 158 Rosenberg, Charles: 167–68n3, 194–95n12 Ross, Betsy: 9, 10 Rossiter, Thomas: career of, 98–100, 112, 117– 18, 182n26; circle of, 88, 98–99, 192–93n48, 193n50, 195n15; as historical painter, 72, 99– 100, 117–18; illustrations for Vala, 100, 105, 112 (“Glory Forever to Art,” 100, 101, 103; Merchants of New York or Merchants of America, 100; Studio Reception, 98–100, 99, 117, 118; Washington and Lafayette at Mount Vernon, 99, 100); reputation of, 16, 77, 99, 100; works by (The Home of Washington After the War, 152; Liberty Freeing the Shackles of Slavery and Sheltering the Emigrant, 100) Rulison, H. M.: 182n28 Ruskin, John: 85, 189n19, 190n23 Rutherford, Alexander: 180n14 Ryder, Jack: 144, 155 Sabbath: in art, 12, 171n28, 176–77n32; laws to preserve, 4, 33, 77, 100, 171n32 (as anti-­ immigrant, 5, 141, 143); as puritanical, 12, 15 Sadd, Henry: 171n30 and 31; Union Portrait, 176n30 Sam Patch: 21, 57. See also Marble, Dan Sam. See Young Sam Sandusky Register: 140, 200n11 Sandusky, Ohio: 139–40, 146–47, 156, 196n19, 201n23 Saroni, Herrman: 86, 188n9, 189n21 Saunders, Frederick: 8–9, 169n15, 171n32 Savage, John: as editor, 49, 181n24; as journalist, 133, 169n17, 181n24; as poet, 45, 112; portrait of, 181n24; and Mrs. John Savage (Louise Reid), 49, 181n24; and the Sketch Club, 45, 47, 49, 169n17, 180n14 Schaus, William: 12, 58, 122–23 Schiller, Friedrich: 94, 97 Schnellpost (New York): 94 Scribner’s. See Charles Scribner’s Sons sculpture: and artisanal practices, 37, 40, 146– 47, 176–77n32; and portraits, 37–38, 54, 140, 147, 199n1; as prestigious, 20, 47, 135, 147–48; as spiritual, 29, 148–49; styles of, 39, 98–99, 122, 146–47, 159 Seward, William: 1, 6, 33, 185n20, 202n30 Seymour, Horatio: 168–69n12

222 INDEX Shankland, Thomas: 174–75n16 Simms, William Gilmore: 194n3 Sires of ’76: 13. See also Order of the Star Spangled Banner Sketch Club. See Cleveland Sketch Club; New York Sketch Club Skinner, John R. M.: 180n14 Smillie, James: 187n39 Smith, Alfred: 156, 158 Smith, Thomas H.: 180n14 Smith, William D.: 169n14 Snedecor, John: 177–78n36 Snelling, Anna: 169n14 Snelling, Henry H.: 169n14, 179n11 Sonntag, William: 177–78n36, 205n23 Sons of Liberty: 12, 126, 132 South Carolina: 111, 194n3 Spain: 94, 97, 144 Sparry, C.: 92 spirit of the age: as antislavery, 91, 112–13, 144, 146; as industrial, 78–79, 139; as international brotherhood, 50, 84, 91, 137; as ­Moloch, 191n34; as progress, 78, 82, 91, 136–37, 169n16; as Protestant, 78–79, 91, 112–13, 139; as republican, 82, 91, 93, 136– 37, 144; as revolutionary, 12, 82, 84, 139 Spirit of the Times: 169n15, 184n7, 188n8 spiritualism: adherents of, 80, 88, 190nn26,29; and allegorical art, 47, 77, 93, 114; and antislavery, 85; and fairies, 82, 91, 101, 114; and idealism, 86–88, 91; and music, 103, 106, 148 Sprague, L. A.: 180n14 St. Louis: 40, 177–78n36 Stadler, Gustavus: 103, 105–7 Stars and Stripes: 182n28 Stearns, Junius Brutus: career of, 15–16, 72, 112, 130, 137; contributor to American Metropolitan Magazine, 181n23; and the Sketch Club, 180n14; works by (Hannah Duston Killing the Indians, 130; Marriage of George and Martha Washington, 15, 130, 131, 132, 171n33; portrait of L. G. Clark and Charles Elliott, 187n34) Steffens, Lincoln: 156–58 Stephens, Henry L.: 147 Steuben, Baron von: 126 Stewart, A. T.: 119, 166–67n11, 196n22, 199n2 Stillman, William: 87, 190n23 Stoddard, Richard H.: 92 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: 111 Strong, Thomas W.: as engraver for (America’s Own, 20, 31–32; American People’s Journal, 83–84; Sunday Dispatch, 83–84; Young America, 115); as publisher, 2, 20, 169n15 (“Battle of Bunker’s Hill,” 168n6; Illustrated

American News, 114, 169n17, 172n43, 182n28; Know-­Nothing Almanac, 46; Yankee Notions, 20, 83, 84, 182n28; Young America [1856], 47, 114–15; Young America’s Comic Almanac [1855], 20, 172n42) Stuart, Carlos D.: on art, 9, 136–37; as contributor (Nineteenth Century, 84; Odd Fellows’ gift books, 8–9, 14, 85; Republic, 8–9, 10, 50, 52, 85); as editor (American People’s Journal, 82–83, 84–85, 93; Daily News, 189n16; Evening Mirror, 8, 84; Illustrated American News, 20, 114, 172n43, 189n16; New-­Yorker, 84, 172n43; Sun, 8, 14, 25, 84, 132); as minister, 82; as poet, 9, 20, 78, 84, 169n17; portraits of, 82–83, 85, 176–77n32; and the Sketch Club, 11, 50, 88, 176–77n32, 180n14 (as host of, 45, 52); works by (“Flag of Stripes and Stars,” 10; Ianthe, 193n50; “The pure is ever beautiful,” 85) Stuart, Gilbert: 176n25, 192–93n48 Sun (New York): on art, 8–9, 51, 132, 136–37, 180n15; and artisans, 8, 14, 139, 194n11; contributors to, 8, 25; as Democratic, 8, 132, 139; editors of, 14, 25, 65–66, 84, 132 Sunday Dispatch (New York): on art, 51, 135– 36, 137; contributors to, 83–84, 185n20, 199n41; distribution, 177n34; editors of, 16, 51, 52–53, 78, 83–84, 94–95; engravers for, 16, 78, 83–84, 135–36; politics of, 94–95, 135, 139 (and nativism, 15, 16, 51, 83–84) Sunday Mercury (New York): 98, 177n34, 177– 78n36, 192n44 Sunday Morning News (New York): 189n13 Sunday Times: 53, 132–33, 180n14, 194–95n12; and Messenger, 132–33 Symbol (Boston): 80, 188n8 Taft, Alphonso: 159–62, 205–6n24, 206n28 Taft, Louise: 159, 160, 205nn22–23 Taft, Peter Rawson: 161 Taft, William H.: 158, 159–62 Tait, Arthur F.: and artists’ associations, 44, 112, 180n14, 181n19; career of, 44, 48, 179– 80n12, 180n13 Talbot, Jesse: 52, 78, 187n1, 187–88n2, 188n9 taverns: as convivial, 35–36, 45, 67, 71, 186n27; and shooting matches, 67–68, 70; as threats to order, 47, 132 Taylor, Zachary: 182–83n33 temperance: artists in support of, 12, 112; and fraternal associations, 12, 35, 176n31, 188n9; ministers involved in, 28, 80, 95, 112, 176n31; nativist support for, 4, 20, 42, 78, 168–69n12, 173n5; as a Protestant reform, 12, 42, 77, 95, 206n28

INDEX

Thanksgiving: 5, 9, 10, 11, 108–12 theater: in art, 103, 130, 148; and artisan culture, 24, 30, 47, 61, 172; artists involved with, 130, 148, 198n37; critics of, 94; exaggerated style of, 21, 130, 145–46; and immigrants, 47–49; writers for, 47, 52, 82, 108, 191n35 Thirteenth Street Presbyterian Church: 16, 28, 65, 78. See also Burchard, Samuel Thom, James: 180n14 Thome, James A.: 146 Thompson, C. A.: 180n14 Thompson, Jerome: 180n14 Thomson, A. C.: 180n14 Thomson, James: 149 Thorn, A.: 180n14 Thorpe, Thomas Bangs: as editor (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 148, 169n18; Spirit of the Times, 8, 169n15; Sunday Times, 133); as Sketch Club member, 180n14; works by (Mysteries of the Backwoods, 97, 112; Voice to America, 8, 52, 101) Thulstrup, Thure de: “Ministerial Reception,” 27, 174n9 Tindale, Samuel: 28–29, 31, 135, 148 Titian: 98, 118 Townsend, Samuel P.: 65–67, 69–70, 77, 119, 186n22 trades unions: as a brotherhood, 4, 40, 42, 200n10; exclusiveness of, 152; and the workingmen’s movement, 4, 14, 129, 142 transcendentalism: artists associated with, 88, 97, 117, 182n26; and Associationism, 88, 91, 98; and fairies, 91, 94; and labor, 44, 88; and reform, 88, 91 Tribune (New York): art criticism in, 12, 80, 137, 170n23, 202n30; and reform, 139; as a Whig paper, 88, 202n30; writers for, 181n24, 182–83n33, 185n20, 188n3, 202n30. See also Greeley, Horace True American (New York): 51, 182–83n33 True Americans: 16, 108, 141, 152, 203n5 Trumbull, John: 133, 192–93n48; works by (Battle of Bunker’s Hill, 4, 109, 168n6; Signing of the Declaration of Independence, 15, 27, 109, 110, 168n6; portrait of George Washington, 17) Tupper, Martin F.: 78–80, 137, 183n34; Proverbial Philosophy, 78–80 Turk, Francis: 180n14 turkeys: and American Indians, 68, 70, 74–75, 109, 186n28; as sacrifice, 68, 70, 109, 112, 194n3; and turkey shoots, 67–72, 74–76, 112, 121, 186n25 tyrants and tyranny: as capitalism, 30, 66, 83, 105–06, 140–41; as the Catholic church, 12,

223 49, 50, 66; as church and state allied, 61, 88–90, 94, 120, 125; as European, 14, 33, 50, 124–25, 199n1; as monarchies, 9, 84, 91, 120, 125; as the pope, 7, 50, 66, 82, 125 Ullmann, Daniel: 4, 7, 37, 168–69n12 Uncle Sam: 2, 5–6 Uncle Sam’s Youngest Son: Citizen Know Nothing: 5–6, 10, 37, 78 Union (New York): 12, 14, 94, 171n30, 173n5 Union Safety Committee: 36–37, 176–77n32 Union: as a family, 76, 108–12, 113; as the Northern European races, 106–7; origins of, 12–13, 108–9, 112, 144; preservation of, 4–6, 10–11, 20, 76, 127 (and national presses, 8, 10, 12); as Protestant, 14, 26, 67, 91, 109–14; and slavery, 4–6, 80, 114, 127, 166–67n11 Unitarians: 27, 89, 112, 160 United American Mechanics, Junior Order of: 161–62 United American Mechanics. See Order of United American Mechanics United American, The: 1–4, 2, 10, 12, 167n1 United Americans. See Order of United Americans United States: artists popular in, 57–58, 59, 97, 108; as belonging to the native-­born, 7, 195n14, 205n23; compared to Britain, 31, 51, 94, 107, 183n34; as Christian, 67, 186n23; as a colonial power, 62, 73, 154, 162; histories of, 24, 26, 57, 137, 162; as model Republic, 31, 52, 119 Universal Exposition of 1855: 118 Universalists: 80, 82, 176n31, 188n8 Van Buren, Martin: 156, 176–77n32 Vanderlyn, John: 42, 98 Vanity Fair (New York): 147, 180–81n17, 184n9; “Columbus aroused by the cry of ‘land,’ ” 20–21 Veaux, James de: 192–93n48 Vernet, Horace: Mazeppa and the Wolves, 59–61, 60 Vikings: 27, 105 Walcutt, Agnes: friends of, 92; life of, 77, 148, 202n31; musical interests of, 73, 77, 81, 167n12. See also Leeds, Agnes Walcutt, Charles C.: 34, 205n21 Walcutt, David Broderick: 34, 36, 37–38, 40, 177–78n36; and the Piatts, 118–19, 189n19, 195–96n18; works by (Hocking Valley Picnic, 118, 177n34, 195–96n18) Walcutt, George E.: 34, 37–38, 69, 81, 145

224 INDEX Walcutt, William: career of (and the American Art-­Union, 41–42, 179n8; and cooperative associations, 39–40, 43–45 53, 54, 85; education of, 28, 62, 118–19, 135, 146; as inventor, 38–39, 77, 139; in Ohio, 159–60, 205n23; political patronage of, 33, 34, 36, 150; print culture as outlet, 16, 27, 73, 82, 171n32; as a sculptor, 148, 150; and Sketch Clubs, 44–45, 47–50, 146, 180n14; as tied to artisanal culture, 33–39, 67, 125, 139; as typical, 36, 38, 54; as a writer, 25, 77); circle of (artists in, 16, 44, 45–47, 92, 98; in Cincinnati, 159–60; in Cleveland, 143–46; in Columbus, 33; as diverse, 26, 54, 77–78; nativists in, 25, 135; 182–83n33; onboard ship, 56–57; in Paris, 117–18, 189n19; as religious, 77–78; spiritualists in, 80–82, 85–86, 88; support for democratic revolutions among, 57, 182n26;); family of (brothers, 38, 81; burial, 148, 174n13, 202n31; children, 146, 148–49, 202n30, 174–75n16; in Columbus, 33–34, 36, 38, 177n33; English heritage of, 57; marriage and in-­laws, 26, 77, 80; religion, 28, 56, 142); historical art of, 20, 121–34, 137, 139, 159 (and citizenship, 8, 10–11, 74, 126, 133–34; and the Colonial Revival, 151–52); places lived (Cleveland, 143, 146; France, 56, 61–62, 121, 122; Mount Vernon, 150, 203n34; New York, xi, 165n1, 188n8); portrait of, 85–86; portrayal of women, 111– 12, 127–32, 133–34, 149, 198n37; records of, xiv–xv, 26, 77–78, 80, 85, 167n12 (sketchbooks, 121, 179–80n12, 196n23); religious and allegorical art of, 93, 183n38, 148 (as an illustrator, 11, 27, 77, 119–21; [of fairy tales, 91, 94, 103]; as a sculptor, 28–29, 36–37, 62, 135, 148–50); reputation, xii–xiii, 48, 143, 148, 193n1 (in the twentieth century, 158–59); style of (eclectic, 54, 114, 117, 120, 196n22; and exaggeration, 67, 121, 128–30, 145–46, 159; and narrative, 135, 137; and neoclassicism, 39, 136–38, 145–46); western art of (and American Indians, 54–56, 63–65, 69, 71–76; and George Washington, 137; as site for native-­born, 54, 56, 76, 112; and nature’s noblemen, 57, 64–65, 76, 133; and pioneers, 54–59, 62, 69–72); works by: illustrations (“Initial A,” 120–21, “Jardin des Plantes,” 62–63, in Bell Smith Abroad, 103, 117–21, 121; Campfires of the Red Men, 72–74, 97; “Closing Scene,” in Foot-­Prints of Truth, 88, 89, 90–91; “Dom Pedro commits a double murder,” in Fairy Tales and Legends of Many Nations, 94–97, 96; “Joel Wetsel,” American Odd-­Fellows Museum, 14, 35, 54–57, 55,

63–65, 67, 130, 183–84n2; The Lilac at the Door, 81–83, 91; “Mopsey putting the pies in the oven,” Chanticleer, 108, 110–12, 114; “The Protestant Church outside the walls of Paris,” 121; Proverbial Philosophy, 78–80, 79; Vala, 98, 101–3, 102, 116, 167–68n3; “Young Frenchman,” 121); paintings (Death-­ Ride of Simon Kenton [American Mazeppa], 56, 62, 63–65, 118, 122, 133, 145, 185n16, 196n25; Deerslayer at the Shooting Match, 69–72, 70; Eagle Coffee House, 35–36; General Washington departing New York, 122, 137; The Losing Hand (The Gambler), 44, 176n27; Molly Pitcher at the Battle of Monmouth, 128–30, 198n34; Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, 122–34, 123, 159; Toppling the Statue of George III, 8, 122–34, 159, 196n25, 197n31; Turkey Shooting, 65–67, 66, 69–72, 121); portraits, of (Mrs. Abbott, 198n37; Sara Allen, 198n37; the bishop of New Mexico, 57; Bolivar Butts family, 146; the Burchards, 28, 33; C. C. Burr, 82; Leonard Case, 146; Lewis Cass, 33; Henry Clay, 61–62, 117; Columbus asylum inhabitants, 148; the Dennisons, 148, 160; Rachel Félix, 198n37; T. L. Harris, 82; William Henry Harrison, 176n25; S. D. Humphrey, 178n39; Mrs. Ide, 148; the Warren Jenkins family, 33; 189n13; Dan Marble, 184n7; Catherine Oakely, 83; Miss Perry, 159–60; Smith family portraits, 202n31; C. D. Stuart, 82–83, the Tafts, 159–162, 161, 205n22; A. Tait, 179– 80n12; the Townsends, 186n22; the Wights, 85; C. C. Wright, 176–77n32); proposed designs, 80, 137, 183–84n2 (Patented sofa-­ bedstead, 38–39; Tindale monument, 29, 31, 33, 135, 148; Washington Monument, 16, 65, 80, 135–139, 136, 144, 152); sculptures (cemetery monuments, 148–49, 174n13; Henry Clay medal, 36–37, 84; Ide Monument, 149; Anna Lacoste, 82; Musadora, 148, 149–50, 179–80n12, 202–3n33; Perry Monument (Cleveland), xvi–xvii, 135, 139–51, 141, 145, 160, 173n3, restoration and replica of, 155– 56, 202n31, 204n13; Perry Monument (Providence) xvi–xvii, 33, 156–58, 15; Samuel M. Smith, 202n31; Jeptha? Wade, 202n31; Myrilla Walcutt, 149; statue for Mr. Zinn, 202n31); writings of, (for the Daguerreian Journal, “Painting—Its Origin and History,” 26, 174n7, 179n9; for the Evening Post, 173n4; for the Knickerbocker, 25; for the ­Republic, iv, 8–9, 23, 25, 36, 56 [as W: “American Fine Arts,” 52; “Artists and the Smallpox,” 85, 105, 169n14; “Joel Wetsel: A

INDEX

Story of the Backwoods,” 54–56, 64, 69, 76; “My Grandfather’s Recollections of the Revolution,” 25, 72, 126, 130; “Recollections of the Last War (of 1812),” 25, 56, 69, 130, 143; “Thoughts on Going to My Native Home,” 54]; for the Sun, “O Come to the Mountains,” 25, 173n4); unpublished, (“To Agnes,” 26; “New York had been occupied by Washington,” 137; “Notes of a voyage from New York City to London,” 56–57; “The officers were very poor” [Baron von Steuben], 126; “Origins of the Stars & Stripes,” 10, 137; “Recollections of the War of 1812,” 130; “Statue of George the Third in the Bowling Green,” 126, 130–32; “Stories of my Grandfather’s Recollections of the Revolution,” 126, 130–32, “Stories of the far west,” 67, 80; “Subjects to Paint connected with American History,” 137) Walker, Edward: 8–9, 14–15, 18, 24–25, 176n28. See also Odd Fellows Walker, William: 95 Wallace, William Ross: 128, 171n30, 173n1, 198n36; as editor of Two Worlds, 129; poetry of, 5, 31, 199n3 (“Captain Molly Pitcher,” 129; “True American Citizen,” 152, 203n5); “The Washington Memorial,” 137, 140, 152–53 Walsh, Mike: 138 War of 1812: 25, 31, 130, 135, 199n1; and Battle of Lake Erie, 139, 142–3 Ward, Artemus: in Cincinnati, 205–6n24; as editor (Plain Dealer, 93, 143–45, 146–47, 155, 201n21; Vanity Fair, 147, 184n9); and Mac-­A-­ Cheek Press, 201n20 Ward, J. Q. A.: 184–85n11, 195n16 Warren, General Joseph: 4, 48, 174–75n16 Washington City: art at the Capitol, 12, 42, 139; correspondents and presses in, 49, 95, 120, 181n24; statues in, 146–47 Washington Female Native American Association: 3, 168n5 Washington Monument (New York): 16, 65, 132, 137–40, 152–53; and nativists, 135–39, 136, 152–53; press coverage of, 80, 135–37, 144 Washington Monument Association: 135, 136 Washington, George: and artisans, 3, 61, 119, 129, 190n27; birthday, 133, 159; cult of, 11, 15, 100, 143, 154, 201n21 (in nativist media, 15, 133; painters of, 14, 16, 72, 99–100, 130; in popular print media, 9, 12, 168n6, 171n28, 176n30; portraits of, 16, 137, 176n25, 180n13, 199n1; writers on, 17, 51, 78, 158, 204–5n17); Farewell Address of, 15, 37, 152, 170n23; portrayed as (crossing the Delaware, 16–18, 41; deified, 51, 99, 119, 137, 139, 152; as equestrian,

225 17, 135, 146; with his generals, 17, 124, 133, 172n40, 180n13; at home, 99, 100, 139, 152–53, 180n14; inauguration of, 61, 170–71n27; and Lafayette, 11, 100, 137; leading ­international revolution, 44, 51, 119, 183n34; marriage of, 15, 130–31, 171n33; in New York, 122, 126–27, 137; as pious, 17, 51, 130, 137, 172n40; at Valley Forge, 17, 61, 137; in the west, 137); and republican ideology, 31, 78, 119, 139, 152 (including religious liberty, 203n5) Watson, Henry C.: 167–68n3, 169n18 Webber, Charles: 78 Webster, Daniel: 13, 36, 47, 49, 63, 175n17 West Point: 37, 171n32 West, Benjamin: 97, 192–93n48 West: art depicting, 54–65, 67, 73, 81 (specialists in, 68, 72, 112, 184n7); immigrants in, 52, 172n36; land distribution in, 30, 127; slavery in, 5, 49, 127. See also frontiers Western Academy (St. Louis): 40 Western Reserve Historical Society: 155 Wetmore, William J.: 72, 81, 189n21; works by (I May Not Meet Thee, 81; The Lilac at the Door, 81–83, 91, 189n12; Uncle Sam’s Invitation to the World, 82) Wetzel, Lewis: 54–56, 59, 64–65, 184n10 Whig Party: 1, 83, 142, 186n23, 198n38; and ­antislavery, 1, 4, 85, 141; and nativism, 1, 20, 95, 135, 160; in New York, 1, 36 (members, 1, 35–36, 37; patronage of, 36, 84, 135, 182– 83n33; politicians, 1, 4, 37, 85, 133, 168–69n12; presses, 14, 88, 185n20, 189n13, 202n30; Protestants in, 11, 80); in Ohio, 33–38, 160, 175n23, 176n25, 195–96n18 (and nativism, 140, 141); in Rhode Island, 156 White, William D.: 172n35 Whitley, Thomas W.: 105, 167–68n3, 179n8, 192n45, 194–95n12; works by (illustration for Vala, 98, 105; “The People Putting Responsibility to the Test,” 197–98n33) Whitman, Walt: 82, 189n12 Whitney, E. J.: 180n14 Whitney, Thomas R.: in Congress, 72, 74, 95; as editor (Republic, 23–25, 41–42, 48–49, 112, 114, 159; Sunday Morning News; 189n13; Sunday Times, 53, 132); as engraver, 23; as leader of the United Americans, 50–51, 72, 135, 152, 181n22; views of, 112, 114, 159. See also Republic Whittredge, Worthington: 195n16 Wide Awake Gift: 13, 15 Wide Awakes: 5–6, 112, 179n7 Wight, Amherst: 85 Wight, Peter B.: 85 Wilber, Hervey: 174n10

226 INDEX Wilkie, David: 35, 176n28 Williams, Stevens, Williams & Co.: 6, 37, 187n34 Williamson, John: 44 Willis, Nathaniel P.: 189n21, 190–91n32 Willis, Richard Storrs: 187n38, 189n21 Wilson, Woodrow: 154, 158 Windust’s saloon: 45 witches: 15, 172n35 Wolcott, Oliver: 131–32 women: as artisans, 127–32; as artists, 47, 51; and associations, 3, 30, 50–51, 146; and equal rights, 132, 133; as personifications, 29, 33, 51, 91, 148 Women’s Art Museum Association: 160 Wood, Grant: Daughters of Revolution, 16–17 Wood, William: 188n9 working class: and artists, 33, 44; heroes of, 28–29, 31, 121, 126–27 (female, 129–30; firemen, 47, 61); images of, 29–30, 32–33, 82–84, 97, 123–28, 148; and immigrants, 49, 67, 141; media aimed at, 135, 171n32; as militant, 83– 84, 88, 129–30; and realism, 14, 57–58; as revolutionary, 30, 61, 121–28; sites for, 24, 30, 35, 47, 76; and women, 3, 125, 129–30 Working Men’s College (London): 85 workingmen’s and women’s movement: 30, 82, 132, 175n18; poets and authors of, 50, 83–84, 129, 154, 188n3; and protective associations, 3, 4, 159; publications of, 20, 30–31, 33, 61, 80 (for women, 174–75n16); rhetoric of, 98, 190n27 Wotherspoon, William W.: 180n14, 181n19 Wright, C. C.: 37–38, 84, 176–77n32 Wright, James H.: 180nn14,16 writers from, 5, 31, 190n31, 153

Yale University: artists educated at, 4, 11, 168n6; politicians educated at, 4, 159, 182– 83n33, 189n21 Yankee Doodle: 194–95n12 Yankee Notions: 83, 84, 182n28 Yankees: as capitalist, 63, 70–72, 109; as comic, 20, 21, 57, 70, 143; as native-­born, 14, 63, 70–72, 109, 186n27 YMCA: 100 Young America Brotherhood: 40 Young America: 114–15, 194n11, 194–95n12 Young America: 13–14, 158; and anticlericalism, 50, 124, 154; and antislavery, 20, 103–4, 114, 117, 127; artists associated with, 15, 17, 137, 139, 141, 192n42; and cultural ­nationalism, 53, 78, 107–8, 118–19, 186n27 (and a native school of art, 21, 114); and the Democratic Party, 113–14, 117, 139, 143, 181n24; and immigration, 82, 100, 117, 119, 186n27; and international democracy movements, 20, 49–50, 100, 117, 124, 141; and land reform, 30–31, 82, 127, 138, 194n11; presses, 31, 148, 171n30, 181n24, 194n11; ­religious tolerance of, 18, 117; style of, 17, 20–21, 107–8, 114–16, 119–21 (and the Gothic, 137–38); and U.S. territorial expansion, 31, 82, 109; and working-­class rights, 17, 82, 129, 158 Young American Literary Club: 143 Young Sam (New York): 3, 98; editors of, 167–68n3, 169n18, 180–81n17, 194–95n12 Young Sam: 3, 6, 31, 78, 113 Yvon, Adolphe: 62, 199–20, 196n21; Genius of America, 120–21, 137 Zane, Elizabeth: 128, 130

Wendy Jean Katz is Professor of Art History at the University of Nebraska– Lincoln. The most recent of her books are Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City’s Penny Press (Fordham University Press) and The Trans-­ Mississippi and International Expositions of 1898–1899: Art, Anthropology, and Popular Culture at the Fin de Siècle (University of Nebraska Press).