A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (7 page)

Van Buren narrowly prevailed over the leading Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison, Johnson's commander at the Battle of the Thames. But, in an echo of the Democratic convention, Johnson fell short of the electoral votes needed to win the vice presidency. Virginia cast its votes for William Smith of Alabama, which caused the election to be thrown to the Senate, as dictated by the Twelfth Amendment. Richard Mentor Johnson thus became the only vice president ever elected by that body. It was a hollow victory, for his daughter Adeline had just died. Some believed it was from despair over the ugly campaign smears against her father. She was, he said, a “lovely and innocent child…a source of inexhaustible happiness and comfort to me. She was a firm and great prop to my happiness here—but she is gone where sorrow and sighing can never disturb her peaceful and quiet bosom.”

Like so many vice presidents (that is, until Dick Cheney came along), Johnson found his largely ceremonial position frustrating. President Van Buren rarely, if ever, consulted with him, and though he did cast fourteen tie-breaking votes as the Senate's presiding officer, he was stifled by the constitutional limits placed upon the office. Quite simply, he was bored, and spent much of his time lounging around the Senate doing nothing. Journalist Henry B. Stanton described him as “shabbily dressed, and to the last degree clumsy.” Indeed, the vice president was a rather eccentric presence around Washington. The English author Harriet Martineau sat across from him at a dinner party and observed that “if he should become President, he will be as strange-looking potentate as ever ruled. His countenance is wild, though with much cleverness in it; his hair wanders all abroad, and he wears no cravat. But there is no telling how he might look if he dressed like other people.”

When he wasn't in the Senate, which was quite often, the vice president devoted much of his time to his various business ventures back home in Kentucky. These included the Choctaw Academy, which he established to “civilize” Native American boys, and a hotel and tavern he operated at White Sulphur Springs. Amos Kendall, a close associate of Andrew Jackson's, reported to President Van Buren that he found Johnson “happy in the glorious pursuit of tavern keeping—even giving his personal superintendence to the chicken and egg purchasing and water-melon selling department.” Kendall also reported with some consternation details of the vice president's love life. Julia Chinn had died of cholera in 1833, and now Johnson was seeing “a young Delilah of about the complexion of Shakespeare's swarthy Othello.” She was “said to be his third wife,” Kendell continued; “his second, which he sold for her infidelity, having been the sister of the present
lady
.”

By the time Martin Van Buren prepared to run for reelection in 1840, Democratic strategists had come to view Johnson as a major liability. They feared his unconventional personal life was too incendiary at a time when slavery was emerging as a national issue. Even the vice president's old friend Jackson urged Van Buren to drop him in favor of James K. Polk of Tennessee. “I like Col. Johnson but I like my country more,” Old Hickory wrote, “and I allway go for my Country first, and then for my friend.” Johnson did have some valuable assets, however. William Henry Harrison, the victor of Tippecanoe, was again the Whig candidate, and the Democrats needed their own military hero on the ticket to counter his appeal. In a rather spineless move, Van Buren decided to leave the selection of his running mate to the state party organizers, who ultimately settled on Johnson when Polk withdrew from consideration. The vice president campaigned hard, even touching off a riot in Cleveland when he attacked Harrison. Yet the Whigs prevailed, and Van Buren was swept from office.

Johnson was finished politically after the defeat, though he didn't know it at the time. He ran unsuccessfully for the Senate several times and waited expectantly for a call from his party to run for president. It never came. “He is not now even what he formerly was,” noted one observer. “It may be there was never so much of him as many of us were led to suppose.” Johnson did get elected to the Kentucky state legislature in 1850, but he was slipping mentally, and it proved to be a sad coda to his career.
The Louisville Daily Journal
reported that “it is painful to see him on the floor attempting to discharge the duties of a member.” Soon after, on November 19, 1850, Richard Mentor Johnson died of a stroke.

He was remembered in a eulogy delivered by state senator Beriah Maggofin as “the poor man's friend…. Void of ostentation, simple in his taste, his manners, and his dress—brave, magnanimous, patriotic and generous to a fault, in his earliest years he was the beau ideal of the soul and chivalry of Kentucky.” Then he was forgotten.

The crowd gathered more out of curiosity than from any spiritual compulsion. For there, in the heart of the antebellum South, stood a black woman preaching the gospel. Though she had come from the North, where she was born and raised free, Zilpha Elaw knew she might be arrested at any moment and sold as a slave. Local law allowed that. Overcome by fear as the white fingers pointed at her, she retreated to a corner of the church. Yet as she sat nearly frozen, she remembered her calling. “My faith then rallied and my confidence in the Lord returned,” Elaw later wrote, “and I said, ‘Get behind me Satan, for my Jesus hath set me free.'” With that, she came forward again and resumed her sermon.

 

Zilpha Elaw was part of a forgotten minority of American women—both black and white—who, during the first decades of the nineteenth century, defied convention, as well as the scriptural admonition that their sex “keep silence in the churches,” by preaching the gospel. Although they had entered a domain usually reserved for men, they were not quite protofeminists seeking to shake up the established order. Rather, they were women driven by evangelistic fervor during an era of Protestant revivalism known as the Second Great Awakening. The women were tolerated, even embraced for a time by newer sects such as the Methodists and Free Will Baptists, who needed them to minister to their ever-growing flocks. But as these denominations became more firmly established, the female preachers were gradually shunted aside, and in time were almost entirely written out of their churches' histories.

Some women like Zilpha Elaw, who actually preached without the sanction of any denomination, published testimonials of their spiritual rebirths and subsequent missions to spread the word of God. Most are out of print now, and the yellowed and brittle copies that survive (as well as the few that have been reprinted) are the only evidence that these women ever existed—let alone touched and transformed so many thousands of lives.

 

The call from God, as Elaw related it, wasn't subtle. She was an orphaned teenager living with a Quaker family in Pennsylvania when Christ himself silently appeared before her as she milked a cow. She swore on her own salvation that it happened that way, and, she wrote, “The peace of God which passeth understanding was communicated to my heart.” Soon after that vision, in 1808, she joined the Methodists and “enjoyed a delightsome heavenly communion.” Yet, she claimed, God had greater plans for her than a simple conversion. He wanted her to preach the gospel. For a poor black woman at the time, this call had almost overwhelming implications. Feeling unworthy, Zilpha resisted, despite what she said were obvious signs of the Divine will. It wasn't until she attended a frontier camp meeting—one of the great cultural phenomena of the era—that she finally gave in to God.

Millions of Americans (a third of the U.S. population, by some accounts) attended various camp meetings across the country each year. Part religious revival, part carnival, these mass assemblies held on the forested fringes of civilization lasted for days and drew all manner of people, from zealots to hucksters to those merely curious to see the sacred spectacle. The frontier observer Timothy Flint described the camp meetings he witnessed as “the most brilliant theatre in the world.” Against a backdrop of lamplighted trees, preachers exhorted repentance while the faithful fell into fits of spiritual ecstasy.

As the time for a meeting approached, Flint wrote, “coaches, chaises, wagons, carts, people on horseback, and multitudes traveling on foot” hurried from every direction to the forested area that had been selected for the encampment. There tents were pitched “and the religious city [grew] up in a few hours under the trees, beside a stream” that offered an ample supply of fresh water for the enormous congregation.

Zilpha Elaw attended a number of these frontier camp meetings, where, she wrote, “the hardest hearts are melted into tenderness; the driest eyes overflow with tears, and the loftiest spirits bow down.” At one meeting, compelled by the Spirit, she preached for the first time. “After I had finished my exhortation,” she wrote, “I sat down and closed my eyes; and there appeared a light shining round me as well as within me, above the brightness of the sun.” It was out of that light that she reported hearing a voice that said, “Now thou knowest the will of God concerning thee; thou must preach the gospel; and thou must travel far and wide.” As if anticipating her readers' skepticism, Elaw added that the miraculous experience she described “did not occur in the night, when the dozing slumbers and imaginative dreams are prevalent, but at mid-day, between the hours of twelve and two o'clock.”

Transformed and sanctified by what she believed was the hand of God, Elaw's status as a lowly black woman no longer mattered. What she called “the extraordinary directions of the Holy Spirit” empowered her to begin her journey as an independent evangelist without the sanction of any established church and in defiance of all social convention. “Once she had been reborn,” writes historian Catherine A. Brekus, “she was no longer an ordinary black woman, but a Christian who was superior to all the women—and men—who had not yet been saved.”

Elaw's ministry took her all around the country and eventually to England, where she spent at least five years. And though she reported many obstacles along the way—including a husband who discouraged her, dismissive male ministers, and occasionally hostile crowds—she not only prevailed but often redeemed. This was particularly true in the South. After visiting Alexandria, Virginia, for example, she wrote: “I abode there two months, and was an humble agent, in the Lord's hand, of arousing many of His heritage to a great revival; and the weakness and incompetency of the poor coloured female but the more displayed the excellency of the power to be of God.” So profound was Elaw's impact in the South, where the danger of arrest and enslavement loomed constantly, that she counted members of Robert E. Lee's family, as well as the secretary of the navy, Commodore John Rodgers, and his wife among her followers.

Although Zilpha Elaw sought to save souls, not necessarily to reform society, she did suffuse her narrative with running commentary on the racism and sexism that deeply permeated her era. She wrote of whites “who readily sacrifice their intelligence to their prejudices,” and of “men whose whims are law” in the church. Her sardonic characterizations of certain male ministers' “august dignity” and “lordly authority” were not a call to overthrow the established order, however. “Woman is dependent on and subject to man,” she wrote sternly. “Man is not created for the woman, but the woman for the man.” These principles, she declared, “lie at the foundation of the family and social systems, and their violation is a very immoral and guilty act.” Ultimately, Elaw believed that all freedom flowed from God. Hers was “a gospel of human liberation,” writes William L. Andrews in his introduction to her reprinted memoir, “addressed particularly to the spiritually enslaved.”

The narrative ends abruptly in 1845, when Elaw was still in England. Whether or not she ever returned home, and what she did with the rest of her life, is lost to history—much like her ministry would have been had she not written it down.

He was America's first superstar, rising to fame in the century before cinema, when mass entertainment was found only on the stage and the greatest actors shared an unparalleled intimacy with their audiences. Theatergoers marveled at Edwin Forrest's muscular performances and the uniquely American way in which he inhabited the most complex characters, from Othello to Lear, in an arena where English actors had been thought to be naturally superior. But the passionate response to Forrest coincided with an ugly nativist trend in the United States, and it all culminated with a bloody theater riot in 1849 that left thirty-one people dead.

From the moment he first stepped on stage in a small role at the age of eleven, Forrest's course was set. He traveled the country as a teenager, taking any part he could get while living in near poverty. Along the way he befriended unforgettable characters, including the great frontiersman and knife duelist, James Bowie, who inspired him with the spirit of the young nation. And as he honed his craft in insignificant plays and divertissements, the young man's ambition became steadily focused. “He must become a serious tragedian,” writes Richard Moody, Forrest's biographer, “an actor whose physical power would reflect the sublime sweep of his native land, whose spirit would be imbued with the fresh, free air of the young democracy. The American stage had been overrun with effete copyists of the British. It was time a homegrown, able-bodied, high-spirited American actor took over.”

Forrest did indeed take over. Though he was not particularly tall, his well-developed frame, thunderous voice, and vigorous stage movements left audiences awed by his presence. “What a mountain of a man!” exclaimed the English actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble. The actor's physical gifts were matched by the fresh spirit he infused into the characters he played. He made classic roles his own and, as he became more successful, commissioned American playwrights to create new, heroic ones for him to inhabit. Each was approached in a precise, exacting way. “He heightened here and mellowed there,” one writer noted, “rounded this and smoothed that, long after the average actor would have ceased to see that there was room for betterment.”

Authenticity was Forrest's constant quest, and he took extraordinary measures to achieve it. To capture the essence of King Lear's madness, for example, he visited numerous insane asylums and was inspired by the carefully observed delusions of Senator Henry Clay's son Theodore, who believed he was George Washington, as well as the dignified insanity of Benjamin Rush's son John—the very personification of the tragic king, Forrest later said. Theater critic Alfred Ayers wrote in 1901 that “Forrest, probably, made the greatest part that ever has been written—the part of King Lear—more effective; got more out of it, than any other actor ever has gotten out of it, which rightly gives him the first place among the players of all time.” Forrest unabashedly agreed.

Not all critics were quite so laudatory; some thought him a bit bombastic and overwrought at times.
¹
But the masses adored their homegrown hero, and they were the ones who brought in the box office receipts that made him a very wealthy star. “No other actor could churn up their emotions as Forrest did with his stormy renderings of Shakespeare's tragic heroes or with his passionately patriotic impersonations of any one of a half-dozen freedom-loving zealots struggling against tyrannical oppression,” writes Richard Moody. “He was the first actor who refused to subscribe to the nation's cultural inferiority complex.” In so doing, Forrest brought prestige to the American stage and made the people proud. His native appeal, however, would have tragic consequences.

A haughty English actor named William Macready watched Forrest's rapid rise to fame with increasing bitterness. He considered himself the master thespian and was dismayed that someone with Forrest's obvious limitations could achieve such widespread acclaim—especially as his own star was slowly dimming. Macready blamed boorish American audiences. “In this country, the masses, rich and poor, are essentially ignorant or vulgar,” he wrote, “utterly deficient in taste and without the modesty to distrust themselves.” Macready managed to conceal his jealous contempt for Forrest and the two actors remained cordial for years. Ill will eventually burst forth, however, and the very public feud that resulted set the stage for what became known as “the Astor Place Riot.”

It all started with a hiss. Forrest, who was convinced that Macready had tried to sabotage his appearances on the London stage in 1845, was in the audience the following year, when Macready played Hamlet in Edinburgh. Evidently he didn't approve of a mannered dance Macready introduced into the performance and made his feelings known with the unmistakable sound of displeasure. Macready was appalled. “I do not think that such an action has its parallel in all theatrical history!” he stormed melodramatically in his diary. “The low-minded ruffian! He would commit a murder, if he dare.” For his own part, Forrest freely acknowledged the hiss. “The truth is,” he wrote in a letter to the London
Times,
“Mr. Macready thought fit to introduce a fancy dance into his performance of ‘Hamlet,' which I thought, and still think, a desecration of the scene, and at which I evinced that disapprobation.” And so the great clash of egos commenced.

Had Macready been content to stay in England and stew in his grievances, the Astor Place Riot would have been averted. But his career was declining in his native country, and in the fall of 1848 he arrived in America to revive his fortunes. It was a fateful move. Though Macready had enjoyed successful tours of the United States in the past, Forrest was now at the peak of his popularity and clearly had public sentiment on his side. He was the rugged giant of the American stage who had put the spindly, aristocratic Englishman in his place. The public feasted on the actors' spat as newspapers gleefully reported every exchanged barb. And when it was announced that each would be performing the role of Macbeth on different stages, the people were ready. “During the last thirty-six hours the excitement among the theatre-going people has been rising to fever heat in this atmosphere,” the
New York Herald
reported on May 7, 1849. “Forrest plays at the Broadway, Macready at the Astor Place…. The excitement began in the green room, and has been generating for some time, in consequence of the public attitude of the two great tragedians of the age towards each other, and their appearance in this city at the same time, in the same characters, at different theatres.”

Macready got a sobering preview of the mayhem to come during his opening performance that night at the Astor Place Theater (or Opera House, as it was also called). He was greeted with a cacophony of groans and hisses when the curtain rose—“an alarming outbreak that defies description,” according to one account of the evening. That rousing welcome was followed by a barrage of “eggs of doubtful purity, potatoes, a bottle of pungent and nauseating asafoetida, old shoes, and a copper coin.” Macready picked up the coin, the report continued, “placed it in his bosom with dignity,” and with “mock humiliation bowed to the quarter of the galley from which the visitation had descended.” He gamely continued through the first two acts of the tragedy, though not a word from the stage could be heard over the din as he dodged rotten vegetables and other unsavory missiles. But by the third act, when Macbeth came out as the new king, the crowd went crazy and began hurling chairs onto the stage. It was clearly too dangerous to continue, and the curtain fell. “Three groans for the English bulldog!” members of the audience chanted triumphantly. “Nine cheers for Edwin Forrest!”

Macready was sufficiently frightened by his reception to immediately book passage back to England. But a reassuring letter from prominent citizens like Washington Irving and Herman Melville, as well as editorials condemning the night's events, convinced him to stay and perform again at the Astor Place on May 10. “The English actor was certain that the ‘best citizens' and all the forces of law and order were exercising themselves in his behalf,” writes Richard Moody, “and that to play out his engagement would establish once and for all his superiority to the American scoundrel [Forrest] and all his ill-bred supporters.” If he only knew.

A loose confederation of rabble-rousers from various gangs and nativist organizations like the Order of United Americans (forerunner of the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party) papered the city with calls to rally at the “English Aristocratic Opera House” on the night of May 10 and to stand up for Forrest and America. In anticipation of a disturbance, the windows of the theater were barricaded, and New York mayor Caleb Woodhull ordered a large contingent of police to be present at the scene. The military was also put on alert. No one thought to cancel the show, however, and thus all the elements of the unfolding tragedy were in place.

Macready seemed blithely unaware of any impending trouble. “I went gaily, I may say, to the theatre,” he reported in his diary, “and on my way, looking down Astor Place, saw one of the Harlem cars on the railroad stop, discharge a full load of policemen; there seemed to be others at the doors of the theatre. I observed to myself: ‘This is good precaution.' I went to my dressing room, and proceeded with the evening's business.”

While Macready primped backstage, an enormous crowd began to gather outside the theater. All day there had been a scramble for tickets and as curtain time approached for the sold-out performance, people began to rush for the doors. Policemen struggled against the surge and blocked the entrances before the theater was completely filled, leaving some ticket holders outside with the growing mob. Inside, the curtain rose and the first two scenes were played without incident. But the theater loudly erupted when Macready first appeared in the third. All action stopped on stage for fifteen minutes, and even as the play resumed, not a word could be heard through the continuous storm of groans and shouts of abuse. The police stationed in virtually every corner of the theater made no move against the demonstrators until the final scene of the third act, when they arrested a particularly rowdy group and ushered them away. It made little difference. Others in the audience continued the disruption, while the mob outside, almost as if on cue, launched an assault on the building. The barricades put in place earlier proved useless against the onslaught.

“As one window after another cracked,” the
New York Tribune
reported, “the pieces of bricks and paving-stones rattled in on terraces and lobbies, the confusion increased, till the Opera House resembled a fortress besieged by an invading army rather than a place meant for the peaceful amusement of a civilized community.” Through it all, the report continued, “the obnoxious actor went through his part with perfect self-possession, and paid no regard to the tumultuous scene before him.” Indeed, Macready was quite taken with his own performance. “The fifth act was heard,” he pompously recorded in his diary, “and in the very spirit of resistance I flung my whole soul into every word I uttered, acting my very best, and exciting the audience to a sympathy even with the glowing words of fiction, while these dreadful deeds of real crime and outrage were roaring at intervals in our ears, and rising to madness all around us.”

Police surrounding the theater were quickly overwhelmed, and many fell injured under the barrage of bricks and stones hurled by the increasingly ferocious crowd. “About 8 o'clock I reported to the Chief that I thought it would be impossible to retain our position much longer, as the lines had been broken,” Benjamin Fairchild, captain of the Eighth Ward police, later reported. “I was directed to rally the men and make another effort. There was a space cleared in front of the theatre, the people having left to avoid the stones. After this I went again on the 8th street side, and found one or two hundred young men and boys stoning the building. I attempted to make an arrest of one and was beaten back by the mob and had to run for my life.”

As the assault mounted in intensity, it was apparent that military reinforcement would be necessary, and the troops were called in. The mob was unmoved by this display of strength, however. Like the police, the soldiers were mercilessly stoned. According to General Charles Sandford, “Every man was more or less hurt and the horses were rendered almost unmanageable. A dense mob extended as far as I could see to the Third Avenue. The mounted men, being conspicuous marks, received most of the stones, and were finally driven off the ground. I dismounted, returned through the mob, and took charge of the infantry, who were halted in line across the open space beyond the theatre, with a dense mob on both sides, who were assailing them with all sorts of opprobrious epithets and frequent volleys of stones.”

A volley of warning shots was fired, at which the crowd scoffed. “They've got leather flints and blank cartridges,” some shouted, while others, according to one account, “commenced wresting the muskets from the soldiers' hands” and “pelting stones as large as your double fist like a shower of hail.” Another series of shots had more fatal consequences and the desired effect. As people lay dead and dying, many of them innocent bystanders, the mob began to disperse. In the end, at least thirty people were killed, and many more suffered debilitating injuries. Macready, meanwhile, had concluded his performance; soon after the first shots were fired, he snuck out of the theater in disguise and found refuge in the home of Robert Emmet, nephew of the famous Irish patriot. He left New York the next day.

While the riot raged at the Astor Place, Edwin Forrest was at the Broadway performing before a wildly cheering crowd one of his signature roles: the heroic, defiant Spartacus in Robert Bird's
The Gladiator
. (Forrest's and Macready's simultaneous renditions of Macbeth had already taken place several nights before.) Although some editorials blamed Forrest in part for encouraging the mayhem at the Astor Place, his career was hardly compromised and he remained so much an American icon that a
Harper's
columnist was shocked to meet a man in 1862 who had never seen Forrest. “If he had said he had never seen Trinity Church, or the Astor House, it would have been strange; but to aver that he had never seen Forrest was to tax credibility.”