A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It has been my great good fortune in a brief career to have found two ideal mentors, individuals without whose influence and support this book would not have been written: the earlier of my debts is to Beth Lau, whose scholarly rigor and generosity as a teacher kindled my wish to turn from a career in high technology to one in literary scholarship, and whose friendship continues to sustain me; my later debt is to Alan Liu who, from the origins of this study as a rough dissertation idea, challenged me to advance it temporally and intellectually even as, in matters both large and small, he offered suggestions and critiques that seemed always to resonate with my own deepest intentions.
I am indebted also to Julie Carlson, Laura Mandell, and William Warner, who with patience and insight helped to oversee this study in its earlier form as a dissertation. My learning was broadened and deepened by conversations and encounters with an exceptional array of teachers and fellow graduate students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and by inspiring colleagues and students in the Department of English at California State University Long Beach.
Stephen Tabor and Alan Jutzi, rare book curators at the Huntington Library, provided me with valuable assistance in the examination of eighteenth-century poetic editions, some held by that wonderful library and some carted in by me from me from my own heterogeneous collection. Giles Bergel provided helpful information about a portrait of Alexander Pope held by Oxford University’s Bodleian Library that is central to one chapter in this book.
Ben Doyle of Palgrave Macmillan expressed enthusiasm for this project from its earliest stages and shepherded it through to completion, and Tom Rene helped to guide me through the complexities of the publication process. Palgrave’s initially anonymous reader, Olivia Murphy, provided both nuanced critique of the manuscript and kind encouragement about its potential.
The earliest of personal debts is to my late parents, Gerald Egan, II and Elizabeth Ann Tichenor Egan, each of whom gave me a sense of the magic of printed pages and the books in which they are bound. My children, Yulan and Gery, have listened and observed as I have worked on this project in various forms from their high school years into early adulthood, and their presence has fortified me more than they could know.
My deepest debt of gratitude is to my wife, Leah Egan, who has challenged and inspired me, and provided me always with the emotional sustenance to forge ahead. This book is dedicated to her.
A BBREVIATIONS
BLJ Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. L. A. Marchand
BPW Byron’s Poetical Works, ed. J. J. McGann
CAP Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. G. Sherburne
PAP Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. J. Butt et al.
WMR Works of Mary Robinson, ed. W. B. Brewer
L IST OF F IGURES
Fig. 2.1 “Void of Beauty” (left) and “More Varied and Pleasing Form” (right), from Analysis of Beauty, Plate II by William Hogarth, 1753. Author’s collection
Fig. 2.2 Sir J. Reynolds by D. B. Pariset after P. Falconet, 1768, frontispiece to The Works of Jonathan Richardson, 1793.
Author’s collection
Fig. 2.3 From Analysis of Beauty, Plate I by William Hogarth, 1753.
Author’s collection
Fig. 3.1 Closing couplet of Rape of the Lock followed by imprint of lines from prior page from The Works of Mr. Pope, 1717. Author’s collection
Fig. 3.2 Bleeding of ink on facing pages from The Works of Mr. Pope, 1717. Author’s collection
Fig. 3.3 A pagination problem from The Works of Mr. Pope, 1717.
Author’s collection
Fig. 3.4 Mr. Pope by George White after Godfrey Kneller, 1732. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved
Fig. 3.5 Mrs. Mary Robinson by Joshua Reynolds, 1783–1784. © \The Wallace Collection
Fig. 3.6 George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron by John Henry Robinson after Richard Westall, 1831. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
All rights reserved
Fig. 3.7 “Heinrich von Veldeke” from the Codex Manesse, ca. 1305–1340. © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd./ Alamy Stock Photo
26
37
37
66
67
68
71
71
72
73
Fig. 3.8 “Christine de Pizan” from Le Livre de la Cité des dames.
By permission of the Royal Library of Belgium 74
Fig. 3.9 Florizel and Perdita, anonymous, 1780.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 77
Fig. 3.10 A noble poet – scratching up his ideas by Charles Williams, 1823.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 78
Fig. 3.11 The Poetical Tom-Titt perch’d upon the Mount of Love…, anonymous, 1742.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 79
Fig. 4.1 January Calendar, page 4 from Book of Hours (Salisbury). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library 87
Fig. 4.2 Page Fol. 38 from The Workes of Our Ancient and learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, edited by Thomas Speght, 1602. Author’s collection 96
Fig. 4.3 Page 255 from Homer, his Iliads: Translated, Adorn’d with Sculpture, and Illustrated with Annotations by John Ogilby, 1660. Author’s collection 97
Fig. 4.4 Page 78 from folio edition of The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, 1717. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California 98
Fig. 4.5 Page 83 from quarto edition of The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, 1717.
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California 99
Fig. 4.6 Mr. Alexander Pope by Charles Jervas, 1714.
The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (LP 243) 112
Fig. 4.7 Mr. Alexander Pope by George Vertue after Charles Jervas, 1715, frontispiece to Pope’s 1717 Works. Author’s collection 113
Fig. 4.8 Mr. Steele by John Simon after Sir Godfrey Kneller, ca. 1712–1713.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 115
Fig. 5.1 Page 200 from Poems by Mrs. M. Robinson, printed by J. Bell, 1791. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California 140
Fig. 5.2 Page 42 from The Beauties of Mrs. Robinson, printed for H. D. Symonds, 1791. Courtesy of University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Libraries Special Collections 141
Fig. 5.3 Close-up of double-ruled header from Poems by Mrs. M. Robinson, printed by J. Bell, 1791. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California 142
Fig. 5.4 Miss Kitty Fisher by Richard Houston after Sir Joshua Reynolds, ca. 1759–1765.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserve 151
Fig. 5.5 Sarah (Kemble) Siddons as the Tragic Muse by Joshua Reynolds, 1783–1784. © Courtesy of The Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, California 152
Fig. 5.6 Mrs. Mary Robinson by Joshua Reynolds, 1783–1784.
© The Wallace Collection 156
Fig. 5.7 Mrs. Robinson by Thomas Burke after Joshua Reynolds, 1791, frontispiece to Robinson’s 1791 Poems. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California 157
Fig. 5.8 Mary Robinson by William Daniell after George Dance, 1793. Author’s collection 162
Fig. 6.1 Byron by William Finden after George Sanders, 1830. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 166
Fig. 6.2 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, in boards, 1818. Author’s collection 183
Fig. 6.3 Advertisement for “Lord Byron’s Poems” from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Fourth, 1818. Author’s collection 184
Fig. 6.4 Byron’s Works, custom bound, 1819. Author’s collection 186
Fig. 6.5 Portrait of a Nobleman by Samuel Agar after Thomas Williams, 1815. Author’s collection 187
Fig. 6.6 Apollo Belvedere, by Jean Jacques Avril, 1809. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 193
Fig. 6.7 The Honble Augustus Keppel by Edward Fisher after Joshua Reynolds, 1759. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 200
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In August of 1715 Alexander Pope placed the following advertisement in London’s Daily Courant:
On Tuesday next will be Published, A Print of Mr. Alexander Pope, done from the Original Painting of Mr. Jervasi, by Mr. Vertue. Printed for Bernard Lintott between the Temple Gates: where his Translation of Homer, and all his other Pieces may be had.
The public offer for sale of this engraved portrait, a daring act of selfpromotion for a little-known twenty-seven-year-old, suggests that early in his career Pope understood that poetic laurels might follow not just from the artful arrangement of words on the pages of his books, but from a carefully composed image of himself in full array, outfitted in periwig, ruffled cuffs, and velvet jacket, as the early eighteenth-century “modish” young man of fashion. The engraving would reappear two years later in Pope’s Works of 1717, and its conspicuous size in relation to the book— it had to be folded twice to fit into the quarto volume—indicates the importance the image held for him. In his Preface to the book Pope writes that “a good Poet no sooner communicates his works … but it is imagined he is a vain young creature given up to the ambition of fame,” the defensive assertion followed a page later by the complaint that “it is with a fine Genius as with a fine fashion, all those are displeas’d at it who are not able to follow it.” In portrait and prefatory text, in both instances
with a characteristic mix of deference and combativeness, Pope affiliates poetic genius with fashionable contemporaneity.
Pope’s suggestive trope provides the starting point in the present study for an examination of the yoking of poetic genius to fashion over the long eighteenth century, a cultural metaphor whose terms are most strikingly visible in the stylish quarto and octavo editions, themselves objects of fashion and luxury, that gain in popularity over the period as the large folio chained to a library table gives way to the polite hand-held book designed for a genteel urban audience. While recent studies of eighteenthcentury and romantic genius have at times touched on material histories of the book and portraits of authors, none has considered how the poetic edition in its materiality might itself represent the image of poetic genius as a figure of stylish urbanity. Pope’s prefatory attempt at self-promotion in 1717 suggests the paradox at work, the faculty of genius—traditionally timeless, unconditional, seated in immaterial soul or mind—manifest in the most particular, sensory, and conditional of cultural formations, fashion. This study explores the possibility that it is not just in the sign systems of single-author editions of the period, in their signifying words and images, that the poet of genius appears as London lady or gentleman of fashion; it is in the material properties of the books themselves that the metaphor is fully realized as page layout, typography, illustrations, and binding effectively package the timeless truths of high art in the fashionable luxury object. Daniel Leonhard Purdy has written eloquently of fashion’s “struggle with itself,” the ongoing self-critical desire of fashion “to insist that is above fashion” (10). Although Purdy associates this struggle with twentieth-century fashion and modernism, part of my argument in this study is that this self-critical engagement with the contemporary and the modish is intrinsic to the formulations of the autonomous subject that evolve in the long eighteenth century, and that this self-critical struggle is perhaps most clearly evident in that fashionable individual, the poet of genius. It is visible, as we shall see, in the details of the products that mark their public images, in the letterforms, the disposition of white space, and the punctuation that mark the pages of their books, and in the details of the portraits that represent them. The emergence of fashionable genius is related to the eighteenth-century emergence of aesthetics, both founded on the empiricist notion that the senses might serve as the primary instruments of knowledge; this notion, I will suggest, is vividly imaged in the portraits of authors that appear in this period in which the primary organs of sensory perception, the eyes and the hands, take on new prominence.
Pope was among the first to grasp the promise that the book held for those who sought to establish and maintain control over a public persona, and the 1717 Works is thus one of the earliest in a series of authorial attempts to represent genius through a deployment of image and text in the printed book. In the chapters that follow, I examine this mode of self-representation through close readings of poems and frontispiece portraits in editions of Pope, Mary Robinson, and Lord Byron, discovering in these books a process of public image-making that anticipates (in the case of Pope) and reflects (in those of Robinson and Byron) the crisis of the self of the 1780s and 1790s that culminates politically in the chaos of post-revolutionary France and intellectually in the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The aporia famously identified by Kant separates the domain of nature, the sensible world of appearances in which all phenomena are subject to the laws of causation, from the supersensible domain of that which is essential to the moral and rational life: freedom, which by definition transcends spatial and temporal conditions. Kant writes of “an incalculable gulf fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, as the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible, so that from the former to the latter … no transition is possible” (II. 176). As beings who exist in the phenomenal world of space and time we are in the Kantian view conditioned by and subject to the laws of nature; and yet as free and moral beings we necessarily partake of that which transcends that world, that which is self-caused, unconditioned, and distinct from the sensible world of appearances. It is this “incalculable gulf” that Kant addresses in the Critique of Judgment and that the German idealists and early German romantics, in their responses to the corpus of Kant’s critical philosophy, labored to close. The gulf, ultimately, is that of a noumenal self inaccessible to the understanding and reason, a self unrepresentable to itself. Kant’s proposed solution to this dilemma in the third Critique, however tentative and qualified, is that through a faculty of reflective judgment that discovers the beautiful and the sublime in the particularity of nature, we might bridge this seemingly impassable gap. The product of reflective judgment is what Kant terms the “aesthetic idea,” and the faculty that originates such ideas is genius.
This dilemma of an insuperable gulf between the material and the immaterial had, however, been a problem for Enlightenment philosophy since Descartes, and part of my argument is that Pope, Robinson, and Byron engage with this dilemma in books that seek to clothe timeless genius in the materials of fashionable contemporaneity. These three
poets differ in fundamental ways: their origins and private lives, the shapes that their public careers took and the decades in which these careers progressed, the types of public personae that with uneven success each attempted to present to an increasingly anonymous readership. It is in the public personae, however, so carefully crafted and yet always just beyond control, that Pope, Robinson, and Byron share a characteristic that sets them largely apart from other authors of the period, for each enjoyed a mode of contemporary fame founded as much on the visual presentation of a distinctive physicality as on the textual presentation of truth in poetry. This is a style of fame in which image becomes “image,” the accumulation of textual and visual references made public that, in sum, exceeds the allotment of fame usually accorded authorship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The processes of image-making which each of these poets sets in motion, over which each maintains only sporadic control, are culturally and historically significant instances of what Kant, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel refer to as Darstellung, the figural representation of the unknowable in sensible form. For Pope, Robinson, and Byron the medium for the representation of the noumenal self of genius—for Darstellung itself—is the book, an object of fashion in its own right, which emerges in this process as one of the primary vehicles for the practice of self-representation that links fashion to the mysterious faculty of genius. It is in part as a consequence of the influential cultural productions associated with these three poets that the nascent figure of the autonomous subject that emerges in the long eighteenth century is in one of its most visible incarnations the book author: the poetic genius-celebrity variously embodied in authorized and pirated editions manufactured and disseminated by congeries of collaborators, publishers, printers, patrons, pirates, satirists, subscribers, painters, illustrators, and engravers, to name a few of the parties to this process and to make clear that no single agent, no autonomous subject, is responsible for this deployment.
The advertisement that Pope placed in the Daily Courant in August 1715 is an appropriate document with which to begin this investigation, as it brings into focus a core tenet of this study: that the formation of fashionable genius in the long eighteenth century is founded on the image, specifically on the authorial portrait designed for commercial distribution, either separately or bound in an edition which it authorizes as frontispiece. In the authorial engravings featured in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books of poetry, the conventions of a burgeoning visual culture sanctified the body of the poet as the Homeric or Sapphic
figure of the bard or prophet, as timeless and transcendent genius; and yet the engravings, by their very nature as realistic, perspectival representations of living individuals, tended also to magnify the accidental and particular, to represent the body in all of its contingent contemporaneity, bewigged and powdered, modishly arrayed and made up for the fashionable public spaces of London. The body represented in its particularity is inevitably sexualized, imperfect, even malformed, and the accoutrements of fashion and urbanity in these fashionable images adumbrate what they teasingly conceal from an increasingly avid viewing public: the body in its disarray. In this context, the images of Pope, Robinson, and Byron current in their years of fame and disgrace participate in Darstellung, the process of symbolic figuration rendered by Kant’s English translators as exhibition: “fine Genius,” as Pope’s apt simile has it, on display as “fine fashion” in the troubled figure of incipient celebrity. Fashion is here the emblem of scandal, and the Kantian chasm that yawns between the conditioned and the unconditioned is embodied in the paradoxical figure of noumenal genius as the man or lady about town, an image of genius refracted in the gazes of approval and opprobrium that arise from London’s pleasure gardens and drawing rooms.
My exploration of the nexus of ideas that late Enlightenment philosophy ultimately brings to the fore in the 1780s and 1790s—the redemptive possibility that in a mechanistic universe we might rationally deduce what is transcendent, that the aesthetic idea might bridge the gap between nature and freedom, that such redemption is embodied in the person of genius—focuses upon the way in which these transcendental deductions are complicated and distressed as they materialize in the fashionable figure of the book author as contemporary celebrity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While my theoretical approach references Kant’s critical philosophy in terms of its visual and representational modalities, my study is not oriented teleologically towards Kant as the resolution or endpoint of intractable questions of self-representation. Rather, my approach is ultimately grounded in close readings of editions of Pope, Robinson, and Byron, three poets whose very different careers, in succession spanning the period, share certain important characteristics. Each enjoyed or endured an extensive fame or notoriety disproportionate to the reception of his or her poetry; was publicly associated, through the publication of numerous portraits and satirical prints, with idiosyncratic styles of personal presentation; was the subject of reports and rumors of sexual impropriety; and suffered chronic physical frailty or disability. I hope to show in
the pages that follow that this matrix of characteristics helps to define the public persona of each poet as flawed genius implicated in the snares of contemporaneity—in the world, so to speak, of fashion—and that the opposition of genius to fashion is most visible in the books, the complex objects of fashion that are the centerpieces of these public careers. In its focus on three singular poets, this study spans the century from Pope’s optimistic embrace of fashion in the 1717 Works, followed by the abnegation of fashion that will characterize his public image into the 1740s; to Robinson’s ambivalence in her 1791 Poems about the fashionable image on which her fame as actress and celebrity had in large part been based; and finally to Byron’s rejection of fashion as an element of authorial celebrity in his 1818 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, a refusal that is despite itself a fashionable mode of public presentation. This century-long narrative suggests that we might approach the evolution of “genius” in the period—the movement from the early eighteenth-century supposition that faculties of mental representation could provide a polite engagement with the world, towards the later contrary formulation that the exercise of these faculties at the highest levels of creativity disengages the genius, sequestering him or her from society—in the contexts of the material book and fashion.
Chapter 2, “Freedom, Nature, and the English School of Commercial Art,” lays the theoretical foundation for this study by situating the eighteenth-century theories of visual representation of Jonathan Richardson, William Hogarth, and Joshua Reynolds in relation to Locke’s theories of ideas and representation, and Kant’s articulation of figural representation or Darstellung as the characteristic mode of genius. Richardson, Hogarth, and Reynolds were not only theorists of the visual arts, but practicing portraitists familiar with styles of dress and personal presentation in eighteenthcentury London. The theories of visuality that Richardson formulated in 1715 would evoke a series of responses and reformulations in eighteenthcentury Britain that, taken together, constitute the theoretical-philosophical substratum of the English school of commercial art, a commerce- and print-centered culture in which urbane, fashionable representations of genius feature prominently. Richardson writes within memory of the 1688 Glorious Revolution and in the context of such consequent developments as the loosening and ultimate removal of government restrictions on the importation of paintings and engravings into England from continental Europe in the 1690s1; the publication of Locke’s Essay (1689); the expiration of the Stationers’ Company’s monopoly on printed books (1694) and
the institution of modern copyright (the “statute of Anne” in 1709); the development of partisan, party politics of Whig versus Tory; and the Act of Union of 1707. The responses to Richardson’s theory, which like his written treatises follow upon this welter of historical conditions and events, take two paths that initially diverge and ultimately join in the evolution of British eighteenth-century visual culture: through a subversively urban empiricism exemplified by William Hogarth in his “moral subjects” and his Analysis of Beauty (1753); and a commercially inflected classical idealism typified by Joshua Reynolds in his celebrity portraits and his Discourses on Art (1769–90). The commercially oriented theories of all three prove crucial links between eighteenth-century philosophical formulations of subjectivity, mental representation, and artistic genius, and the conditional realms of fashion and politeness.
In Chap. 3, “The Plural Book and the Authorial Portrait,” I consider how Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s notion of the “plural book” suggests that we might understand the single-author edition, traditionally idealized as a “unitary” book, in terms of the intransigently diverse particulars of which it is constituted and which follow from collaborative work processes in print shop and bindery. This chapter presents a summary history of these processes in relation to the plural book’s visual and textual potential for self-representation, focusing in particular on a historicized image of the author present in medieval images of authors as solitary writers cloistered in monastic cells such as those of Heinrich von Veldeke and Christine de Pizan. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this visual motif of the cloistered author evolves into depictions of fashionably melancholic, headin-hand poses, the writer here depicted as a version of Charles Taylor’s “buffered” Enlightenment subject, sequestered from environment and world by his or her representational powers of genius.
Chapter 4, “Pope’s Fashionable Handbook,” analyzes text and image in Pope’s Works of 1717, considering specifically the Essay on Criticism in relation to the outsized frontispiece portrait in which Pope puts himself on display as timeless genius in the guise of fashionable London urbanity. In the Essay Pope sets himself apart from his predecessors in a dazzling performance of poetic virtuosity borne out in the material properties of his innovative quarto book, including its page layout and the foldout frontispiece portrait of him as London gentleman that opens the volume. As we shall see, a close reading of a specific page from the Essay—a reading that focuses as much on the layout of the page as the text—suggests that the curling brace that marks poetic triplets in the right margin of the page is
more than just a typographical convention, that in this book in particular it is an emblem for the assertive “licentiousness” and originality of a poet whose “master hand” reaches out to enclose the nameless graces of poetic inspiration. The image of himself as the fashionably urbane “master hand” of poetic genius which Pope authorizes and publicizes in his 1717 Works emerges in the context of the numerous unauthorized satirical representations of him already in circulation this early in his career, texts and images which suggest a public avidity to view the poet as a diminutive monster of inchoate and unmanly sexuality. Pope’s contention with the ambivalent urges of his readers and viewers—the conflicting desires both to canonize and to demonize him in image and text—provides us with a model for the fashionable author’s relationship to his public as such relationships will evolve in the print and visual culture of the period.
Chapter 5, “Mary Robinson: Fashioning Freedom,” examines Robinson’s Poems of 1791 as the pivotal point in her transition from former actress and anonymous author of “Della Cruscan” verse in newspaper dailies to the established book author, “Mrs. Robinson.” This volume, very likely the most heavily promoted book of the year if not of the era in which it was published, manages in its own material properties to capture the mix of fashionable elegance and radical politics that characterizes the time and place of its inception, the Whig high society of London’s West End circa 1789–90. Through its typographical elegance (a product of Robinson’s collaborative exchanges with her publisher John Bell) and its frontispiece portrait of Robinson as a lady of melancholy sensibility (also a product of a collaborative exchange, this one with her portraitist Joshua Reynolds), the book represents her as a writer at the forefront of this eighteenth-century style of radical chic. This mix of characteristics comes into play with particular emphasis in Robinson’s poem Ainsi va le monde, her paean to freedom and the French Revolution which includes a passage that, in its curious incongruity, is central both to the poem and the book in which it appears: a stanza of homage to the commercially oriented portraitist Reynolds, who in Robinson’s depiction is at once a divinely inspired genius and the creator of her own fashionably contemporary public image. In its entirety, the book manages to embody Robinson’s transition from seemingly washed-up celebrity to one of the most successful poets and novelists of the 1790s.
Chapter 6, “Byron’s Fashionable Abstention,” examines the 1818 publication in octavo of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, exploring the evanescent presence and ultimate disappearance of the Byronic alter ego
Harold in this poem (which is also, variably, a book in its own right and a component in the many collected editions of Byron’s works published by John Murray) in conjunction with the absence of a conventional frontispiece portrait, a lacuna that has characterized all of Byron’s authorized editions up to this point. The absence of the portrait from Byron’s editions is a teasing ellipsis that—given his astonishing fame and notoriety in the 1810s—would have been “visible” to the contemporary reader, and in my analysis it points to Byron’s well-known alienation from his readers and his corresponding, but less-remarked, detachment from the publication process. The blank page that the reader sees opposite the title page in such editions of Byron is a bibliographic code for the image of Byron, a marker for his teasing and phantasmal presence and absence as genius-celebrity. We can consider this ellipsis in the context of the “modular” form of distribution of Byron’s works that had evolved by 1818, one in which—as John Murray’s advertisements make clear—Byron’s readers could mix and match his works to fashion their own version of the poet who had decisively absented himself from English society.
I propose now to return to 1715, however, segueing from Pope’s offer for sale of an image of himself in the Daily Courant, which opened this chapter, to the publication that same year of Jonathan Richardson’s seminal Essay on the Theory of Painting. Let us examine how this first serious English treatise on painting modulates and adapts the theories of art and the body that I have begun to sketch out to the realities of 1715—to those commercial, technological, and philosophical currents and conditions in which a burgeoning post-Restoration market for private portraiture evolves over the century into a rich milieu for the development of fashionable genius.
N ote
1. See Pears, pp. 52–54.
Freedom, Nature, and the English School of Commercial Art
Over the course of the eighteenth century, an aggregate of theories on painting and the visual arts appeared in Britain that I refer to here as “the English school of commercial art.” Its main theorists were Jonathan Richardson, William Hogarth, and Joshua Reynolds, and while their ideas do not truly constitute a coherent “school of thought,” taken together they suggest that the theories, practices, and reception of painting in eighteenth-century England contributed to an emerging idea of subjectivity, a notion that creative self-consciousness might be coterminous with fashionable self-presentation. The theories of visuality of Richardson, Hogarth, and Reynolds share in certain important properties. All three were profoundly influenced by and responsive to the empiricist philosophies gaining currency in England at this time, most notably that of John Locke. All three anticipated the formulations of aesthetic judgment, subjectivity, and genius put forward by Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s in his critical philosophy, an attempted systematization that has been described both as bringing the narrative of Enlightenment philosophy to a grand resolution and as raising questions about subjectivity that remain unanswered into modernity. Perhaps most significantly, all three writers were actively engaged in the commercial practice of the art that they theorized. Our experience of fashionable objects is primarily visual,
and as practicing portrait painters, Richardson, Hogarth, and Reynolds were alert to the material and ideational properties of drapery, hair styles, and the ornaments that adorn the bodies of men and women. Their treatises on painting, spanning the century, suggest the emergence into public discourses—both verbal and visual—of a particular type of subject, the creative genius who is also a figure of fashionable urbanity. In the works of all three, the nature of this complex figure is suggested in a succession of questions and conundrums that apply the concerns of idealist and empiricist philosophy to the emerging field of aesthetics. For instance, do our impressions of visible phenomena, which include the fashionably adorned bodies of urban contemporaries, conduce to ideas and abstractions? Are our fleeting and conditional impressions of such phenomena answerable to ideal beauty? Can a faculty of genius which “improves” nature in acts of artistic creativity flow somehow from the exertions of a “mechanic” whose “curious hand” and perceptive eye engage with drapery, hair styles, and other ornaments? Significantly, questions like these were made public by the theorists of the English school in stylish octavo books, objects which, as we shall see, themselves emerge in significant and unexpected ways as fashionable embodiments of genius.
R icha
Rdson ’ s E mpi Ricist V isuality
In 1714, aged 50 and never having previously published, the portrait painter Jonathan Richardson wrote what has come to be regarded as the first serious English treatise on the visual arts, The Essay on the Theory of Painting. 1 Before Richardson, authors on the visual arts in England produced writings that were neither systematic nor analytical, that tended to an over-reliance on classical and continental authorities.2 Richardson’s 1715 Theory is at once a workmanlike compendium of history and practice for the novice and a sometimes loosely woven theory of visual representation grounded in Lockean empiricism which discovers communicable ideas in the particularities of sensory visual experience. Corollary to this theory is an argument for the supremacy of painterly genius as it combines the handcraft of the mechanic who molds and reworks the materials of nature with the creative imagination of the artist who divines and communicates such universal properties as “grace and greatness.” John Barrell has identified Richardson’s promotion of the painter from mechanic to liberal gentleman with a “bourgeois” strain of eighteenth-century civic humanism, one that, in its privileging of the private virtues and self-interest, challenges
“traditional” civic humanism (21, quotation marks in original). My own view of Richardson’s procedure is that it does not so much address the painter’s social rank as adduce in him a duality wherein the artificer conditioned by the world of empirical experience is at one with the creative genius who sees into and beyond that world, who discovers in nature’s particularity an idea of nature as it “never was,” in Richardson’s phrase. In Richardson’s Theory, which follows Locke’s influential identification in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) of experience and observation as the grounds of all knowledge and looks forward to Kant’s formulation in the Critique of Judgment a century later of the aesthetic idea as arising from reflection on the particularity of nature, the figure of genius does indeed emerge a gentleman, but only as a consequence of his mastery of these particulars, his ability to discern in the accidents and contingencies of the natural world “what common eyes see not,” to invoke another of Richardson’s formulations. Informed by Lockean empiricism and anticipating Kantian transcendentalism, Richardson’s writings suggest as well as any corpus of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory the inextricable closeness of the relationships that obtain between these Enlightenment philosophies and the cultures of visuality and fashion that will help to shape subjectivity in the period.
In what is perhaps the founding statement of British empiricism, Locke in his 1789 Essay Concerning Human Understanding had compared the human mind to a white sheet of paper, one
void of all Characters, without any Ideas; How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless Fancy of Man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, From Experience …. (104)3
It is experience which provides the mind with ideas, and Locke stipulates that “whatsoever is so constituted in Nature, as to be able, by affecting our Senses, to cause any perception in the Mind, doth thereby produce in the Understanding a simple Idea” (132). His point is that our most basic of ideas—our impressions of color, motion, sweetness, and so on— “convey themselves into the Mind” by way of our physical senses. The faculty that Locke terms “sense” or “sensation” is therefore “the great
Source, of most of the Ideas we have” (105). Ideas also convey themselves into the mind through reflection, which Locke describes as “the Perception of the Operations of our own Minds within us” (105). Although sensory perception is the source of simple ideas, reflection builds upon these simple impressions to furnish the “Understanding with another set of Ideas, which could not be had from things without,” such as “Perception, Thinking, Doubting, Believing, Reasoning, Knowing, Willing, and all the different actings of our own Minds” (105). Reflection, then, encompasses our awareness of our own mental operations—our self-awareness, so to speak.
Locke’s notion of reflection points also, however, to the possibility of originality and creativity. For while we cannot create simple ideas, through reflection on the operations of our own minds we can store new ideas. Locke writes in this connection that sensation and reflection provide man with the Groundwork, whereon to build all those Notions which ever he shall have naturally in this World. All those sublime Thoughts, which towre above the Clouds, and reach as high as Heaven it self, take their Rise and Footing here: In all that great Extent wherein the mind wanders, in those remote Speculations, it may seem to be elevated with, it stirs not one jot beyond those Ideas, which Sense or Reflection, have offered for its Contemplation. (117–18)
The “Ideas of Reflection,” Locke tells us, are the “Original of all Knowledge [and] the first Capacity of Humane Intellect,” and his language suggests that such ideas, which make possible those “sublime Thoughts, which towre above the Clouds,” are in fact the “groundwork” of human creativity. We shall see that the element of Locke’s formulation which will come to exert the strongest influence over Richardson and the theorists of the visual arts who follow him in eighteenth-century Britain is the possibility that the “sublime thoughts” and “remote Speculations” of the genius originate in the body, in “Impressions made on our Senses by outward Objects” (117).
Locke’s formulation of the “endless variety” of ideas “painted” on the mind’s blank canvas invited further visual analogy, and a generation later Richardson responded in his Theory with a characterization of the visible world as the “innumerable colours and figures for which we have no name” (6). While Richardson does not categorize ideas with the same technical rigor and specificity as Locke, Lockean “ideas” feature prominently in his theory. The manifold of visible phenomena is comprised of ideas,
consisting of “an infinity of … ideas which have no certain words universally agreed upon as denoting them” (Richardson 6). The elements of paintings are also ideas, the pictures in which the painter represents the particularity of the visible world conveying “his ideas of these things clearly, and without ambiguity” (6). In fact, for Richardson ideas are most potent when they are visual, the viewer of a painting a vessel laid open to the experiential force of visual representation which “pours ideas into our minds …. The whole scene opens up at one view” (6). What is evident in such formulations is that the Lockean idea is, for Richardson, primarily an impression or perception of visible phenomena. Further, Richardson points to an ideational capacity possessed by the painter which parallels Locke’s formulations of sensation and reflection as the sources of creativity, for he repeatedly refers to the painter’s ability not only to transmit simple visual ideas, but to employ such internal mental operations as memory and judgment in the process of transforming ideas into painted images. In one of several statements that applies both the Lockean reflective faculties and the inductive method to the art of painting, Richardson comments that “In order to assist, and improve the invention, a painter ought to converse with, and observe all sorts of people …. he should observe the different and various effects of mens passions, and those of other animals, and in short, all nature, and make sketches of what he observes to help his memory” (38). The seemingly simple observation of visible phenomena is for Richardson continuous with complex mental operations such as the discernment, recollection, and representation of the “effects of mens passions.” Lockean reflection, which we have seen to be the source of consciousness or self-awareness, is in Richardson’s Theory explicitly transmuted into “invention” or artistic creativity.
The painter, Richardson tells us repeatedly, employs his or her reflective faculties not only to represent the visible world but to improve it, for “the great and chief ends of Painting are to raise, and improve nature; and to communicate ideas” (176). Richardson argues in a number of key passages that the painter of genius can and indeed must take license with the particulars of visible experience, his or her aim “not only to represent nature, but to make the best choice of it; nay to raise, and improve it from what is commonly, or even rarely seen, to what never was, or will be in fact, though we may easily conceive it might be” (176).4 His language makes clear that, in this raising and improving, the painter does not proceed deductively from an abstract and idealized form to which all particulars conform, as the classically oriented continental approaches of the seventeenth century had
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had gazed for so many trying days. Across the dim and indefinable distance which swept in all directions, the eye often wandered and wondered what might be the revelations of the next moment. Suddenly several dark figures appeared faintly on the horizon. The objects were moving. The question uppermost in the minds of all was, Are they savages or messengers of relief? As on such occasions of anxiety and suspense, time wore heavily, minutes seemed like hours, yet each moment brought the sufferers nearer the realization whether this was their doom or their escape therefrom. Over an hour had elapsed since the objects first came in sight, and yet the mystery remained unsolved. Slowly but surely they developed themselves, until finally they had approached sufficiently near for their character as friends or foes to be unmistakably established. To the joy of the weary watchers, the parties approaching proved to be troops; relief was at hand, the dangers and anxieties of the past few days were ended, and death either by starvation or torture at the hands of the savages no longer stared them in the face. The strong set up a shout such as men seldom utter. It was the unburdening of the heart of the weight of despair. The wounded lifted their fevered forms and fixed their glaring eyes upon the now rapidly approaching succor, and in their delirium involuntarily but feebly reiterated the acclamations of their comrades.
The troops arriving for their relief were a detachment from Fort Wallace under command of Colonel Carpenter of the regular cavalry, and had started from the fort promptly upon the arrival of Trudeau and Stillwell with intelligence of the condition and peril in which Forsyth and his party were.
When Colonel Carpenter and his men reached the island they found its defenders in a most pitiable condition, yet the survivors were determined to be plucky to the last. Forsyth himself, with rather indifferent success, affected to be reading an old novel that he had discovered in a saddlebag; but Colonel Carpenter said his voice was a little unsteady and his eyes somewhat dim when he held out his hand to Carpenter and bade him welcome to “Beecher’s Island,” a name that has since been given to the battle-ground.
During the fight Forsyth counted thirty-two dead Indians within rifle range of the island. Twelve Indian bodies were subsequently discovered in one pit, and five in another. The Indians themselves confessed to a loss of seventy-five killed in action, and when their proclivity for concealing or diminishing the number of their slain in battle is considered, we can readily believe that their actual loss in this fight must have been much greater than they would have us believe.
Of the scouts, Lieutenant Beecher, Surgeon Movers, and six of the men were either killed outright or died of their wounds; eight more were disabled for life; of the remaining twelve who were wounded, nearly all recovered completely During the fight innumerable interesting incidents occurred, some laughable and some serious. On the first day of the conflict a number of young Indian boys from fifteen to eighteen years of age crawled up and shot about fifty arrows into the circle in which the scouts lay. One of these arrows struck one of the men, Frank Herrington, full in the forehead. Not being able to pull it out, one of his companions, lying in the same hole with him, cut off the arrow with his knife, leaving the iron arrowhead sticking in his frontal bone; in a moment a bullet struck him in the side of the head, glanced across his forehead, impinged upon the arrowhead, and the two fastened together fell to the ground—a queer but successful piece of amateur surgery. Herrington wrapped a cloth around his head, which bled profusely, and continued fighting as if nothing had happened.
Howard Morton, another of the scouts, was struck in the head by a bullet, which finally lodged in the rear of one of his eyes, completely destroying its sight forever; but Morton never faltered, but fought bravely until the savages finally withdrew. Hudson Farley, a young stripling of only eighteen, whose father was mortally wounded in the first day’s fight, was shot through the shoulder, yet never mentioned the fact until dark, when the list of wounded was called for. McCall, the First Sergeant, Vilott, Clark, Farley the elder, and others who were wounded, continued to bear their full share of the fight, notwithstanding their great sufferings, until the Indians finally gave up and withdrew. These incidents, of which many similar ones might be told, only go to show the remarkable character of the men who composed Forsyth’s party.
Considering this engagement in all its details and with all its attendant circumstances, remembering that Forsyth’s party, including himself, numbered all told but fifty-one men, and that the Indians numbered about seventeen to one, this fight was one of the most remarkable and at the same time successful contests in which our forces on the Plains have ever been engaged; and the whole affair, from the moment the first shot was fired until the beleaguered party was finally relieved by Colonel Carpenter’s command, was a wonderful exhibition of daring courage, stubborn bravery, and heroic endurance, under circumstances of greatest peril and exposure. In all probability there will never occur, in our future hostilities with the savage tribes of the West, a struggle the equal of that in
which were engaged the heroic men who defended so bravely “Beecher’s island.” Forsyth, the gallant leader, after a long period of suffering and leading the life of an invalid for nearly two years, finally recovered from the effects of his severe wounds, and is now, I am happy to say, as good as new, contentedly awaiting the next war to give him renewed excitement.
XI.
THE winter of 1867–68 found me comfortably quartered at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on the banks of the Missouri. A considerable portion of my regiment had been ordered to locate at that post in the fall, and make that their winter quarters. General Sheridan, then commanding that military department, had also established his headquarters there, so that the post became more than ever the favorite military station in the West. I had not been on duty with my regiment since my rapid ride from Fort Wallace to Fort Harker in July, nor was I destined to serve with it in the field for some time to come. This, at the time, seemed a great deprivation to me, but subsequent events proved most conclusively that it was all for the best, and the result could not have been to me more satisfactory than it was, showing as it did that the best laid plans of mice and men, etc. But I am anticipating.
Those who have read the tabulated list of depredations committed by the Indians, as given in the article describing General Forsyth’s desperate fight on Arickaree Fork, may have noticed the name of William Comstock in the column of killed. Comstock was the favorite and best known scout on the central plains. Frequent reference has been made to him in preceding numbers, particularly in the description of the attack of the Indians on the detachment commanded by Robbins and Cook. Strange as it may seem, when his thorough knowledge of the Indian character is considered, he fell a victim to their treachery and barbarity. The Indians were encamped with their village not far from Big Spring station, in western Kansas, and were professedly at peace. Still, no one familiar with the deceit and bad faith invariably practised by the Indians when free to follow the bent of their inclinations, ought to have thought of trusting themselves in their power Yet Comstock, with all his previous knowledge and experience, did that which he would certainly have
disapproved in others. He left the camp of the troops, which was but a few miles from the Indian village, and with but a single companion rode to the latter, and spent several hours in friendly conversation with the chiefs. Nothing occurred during their visit to excite suspicion. The Indians assumed a most peaceable bearing toward them, and were profuse in their demonstrations of friendship. When the time came for Comstock and his comrade to take their departure, they were urged by the Indians to remain and spend the night in the village.
The invitation was declined, and after the usual salutations the two white men mounted their horses and set out to return to their camp. Comstock always carried in his belt a beautiful white-handled revolver, and wore it on this occasion. This had often attracted the covetous eyes of the savages, and while in the village propositions to barter for it had been made by more than one of the warriors. Comstock invariably refused all offers to exchange it, no matter how tempting. Months before, when riding together at the head of the column, in pursuit of Indians, Comstock, who had observed that I carried a revolver closely resembling his, remarked that I ought to have the pair, and then laughingly added that he would carry his until we found the Indians, and after giving them a sound whipping he would present me the revolver. Frequently during the campaign, when on the march and while sitting around the evening camp fire, Comstock would refer to his promise concerning the revolver. After hunting Indians all summer, but never finding them just when we desired them, Comstock was not unfrequently joked upon the conditions under which he was to part with his revolver, and fears were expressed that if he carried it until we caught and whipped the Indians, he might be forced to go armed for a long time. None of us imagined then that the revolver which was so often the subject of jest, and of which Comstock was so proud, would be the pretext for his massacre.
Comstock and his companion rode out of the village in the direction of their own camp, totally unconscious of coming danger, and least of all from those whose guests they had just been. They had proceeded about a mile from the village when they observed
about a dozen of the young warriors galloping after them. Still suspecting no unfriendly design, they continued their ride until joined by the young warriors. The entire party then rode in company until, as was afterward apparent, the Indians succeeded in separating the two white men, the one riding in front, the other, Comstock, following in rear, each with Indians riding on either side of them. At a preconcerted signal a combined attack was made by the savages upon the two white men. Both the latter attempted to defend themselves, but the odds and the suddenness of the attack deprived them of all hope of saving their lives. Comstock was fatally wounded at the first onslaught, and soon after was shot from his horse. His companion, being finely mounted, wisely intrusted his life to the speed of his horse, and soon outstripped his pursuers, and reached camp with but a few slight wounds. The Indians did not seem disposed to press him as closely as is their usual custom, but seemed only anxious to secure Comstock. He, after falling to the ground severely wounded, was completely riddled by steel-pointed arrows, and his scalp taken. The principal trophy, however, in the opinion of the savages, was the beautifully finished revolver with its white ivory handle, and, as they afterward confessed when peace was proclaimed with their tribe, it was to obtain this revolver that the party of young warriors left the village and followed Comstock to his death. Thoroughly reliable in his reports, brave, modest, and persevering in character, with a remarkable knowledge of the country and the savage tribes infesting it, he was the superior of all men who were scouts by profession with whom I have had any experience.
While sitting in my quarters one day at Fort Leavenworth, late in the fall of 1867, a gentleman was announced whose name recalled a sad and harrowing sight. It proved to be the father of Lieutenant Kidder, whose massacre, with that of his entire party of eleven men, was described in preceding pages. It will be remembered that the savages had hacked, mangled, and burned the bodies of Kidder and his men to such an extent that it was impossible to recognize the body of a single one of the party; even the clothing had been removed, so that we could not distinguish the officer from his men, or the men from each other, by any fragment of their uniform or insignia of their grade. Mr. Kidder, after introducing himself, announced the
object of his visit; it was to ascertain the spot where the remains of his son lay buried, and, after procuring suitable military escort to proceed to the grave and disinter his son’s remains preparatory to transferring them to a resting place in Dakota, of which territory he was at that time one of the judiciary. It was a painful task I had to perform when I communicated to the father the details of the killing of his son and followers. And equally harassing to the feelings was it to have to inform him that there was no possible chance of his being able to recognize his son’s remains. “Was there not the faintest mark or fragment of his uniform by which he might be known?” inquired the anxious parent. “Not one,” was the reluctant reply. “And yet, since I now recall the appearance of the mangled and disfigured remains, there was a mere trifle which attracted my attention, but it could not have been your son who wore it.” “What was it?” eagerly inquired the father. “It was simply the collar-band of one of those ordinary check overshirts so commonly worn on the plains, the color being black and white; the remainder of the garment, as well as all other articles of dress, having been torn or burned from the body.” Mr. Kidder then requested me to repeat the description of the collar and material of which it was made; happily I had some cloth of very similar appearance, and upon exhibiting this to Mr. Kidder, to show the kind I meant, he declared that the body I referred to could be no other than that of his murdered son. He went on to tell how his son had received his appointment in the army but a few weeks before his lamentable death, he only having reported for duty with his company a few days before being sent on the scout which terminated his life; and how, before leaving his home to engage in the military service, his mother, with that thoughtful care and tenderness which only a mother can feel, prepared some articles of wearing apparel, among others a few shirts made from the checked material already described. Mr. Kidder had been to Fort Sedgwick on the Platte, from which post his son had last departed, and there learned that on leaving the post he wore one of the checked shirts and put an extra one in his saddle pockets. Upon this trifling link of evidence Mr. Kidder proceeded four hundred miles west to Fort Wallace, and there being furnished with military escort visited the grave containing the bodies of the twelve massacred men. Upon disinterring the remains
a body was found as I had described it, bearing the simple checked collar-band; the father recognized the remains of his son, and thus, as was stated at the close of a preceding chapter, was the evidence of a mother’s love made the means by which her son’s body was recognized and reclaimed, when all other had failed.
The winter and spring of 1868 were uneventful, so far as Indian hostilities or the movements of troops were concerned. To be on the ground when its services could be made available in case the Indians became troublesome, the Seventh Cavalry left its winter quarters at Fort Leavenworth in April, and marched two hundred and ninety miles west to a point near the present site of Fort Hays, where the troops established their summer rendezvous in camp. It not being my privilege to serve with the regiment at that time, I remained at Fort Leavenworth some time longer, and later in the summer repaired to my home in Michigan, there amid the society of friends to enjoy the cool breezes of Erie until the time came which would require me to go west.
In the mean time, until I can relate some of the scenes which were enacted under my own eye, and which were afterwards the subject of excited and angry comment, as well as of emphatic and authoritative approval, it will not be uninteresting to examine into some of the causes which led to the memorable winter campaign of 1868–’69, including the battle of the Washita; and the reader may also be enabled to judge as to what causes the people of the frontier are most indebted for the comparatively peaceable condition of the savage tribes of the plains during the past three years. The question may also arise as to what influence the wild nomadic tribes of the West are most likely to yield and become peaceably inclined toward their white neighbors, willing to forego their accustomed raids and attacks upon the frontier settlements, and content to no longer oppose the advance of civilization. Whether this desirable condition of affairs can be permanently and best secured by the display and exercise of a strong but just military power, or by the extension of the olive-branch on one hand and government annuities on the other, or by a happy combination of both, has long been one of the difficult problems whose solution has baffled the judgment of our legislators
from the formation of the government to the present time. My firm conviction, based upon an intimate and thorough analysis of the habits, traits of character, and natural instinct of the Indian, and strengthened and supported by the almost unanimous opinion of all persons who have made the Indian problem a study, and have studied it, not from a distance, but in immediate contact with all the facts bearing thereupon, is that the Indian cannot be elevated to that great level where he can be induced to adopt any policy or mode of life varying from those to which he has ever been accustomed by any method of teaching, argument, reasoning, or coaxing which is not preceded and followed closely in reserve by a superior physical force. In other words, the Indian is capable of recognizing no controlling influence but that of stern arbitrary power. To assume that he can be guided by appeals to his ideas of moral right and wrong, independent of threatening or final compulsion, is to place him far above his more civilized brothers of the white race, who, in the most advanced stage of refinement and morality, still find it necessary to employ force, sometimes resort to war, to exact justice from a neighboring nation. And yet there are those who argue that the Indian with all his lack of moral privileges, is so superior to the white race as to be capable of being controlled in his savage traits and customs, and induced to lead a proper life, simply by being politely requested to do so. The campaign of 1868–’69, under the direction of General Sheridan, who had entire command of the country infested by the five troublesome and warlike tribes, the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches, was fruitful in valuable results. At the same time the opponents of a war policy raised the cry that the military were making war on friendly Indians; one writer, an Indian agent, even asserting that the troops had attacked and killed Indians half civilized, who had fought on the side of the Government during the war with the Confederate States. It was claimed by the adherents of the peace party that the Indians above named had been guilty of no depredations against the whites, and had done nothing deserving of the exercise of military power. I believe it is a rule in evidence that a party coming into court is not expected to impeach his own witnesses. I propose to show by the official statements of the officers of the Indian Department, including
some of those who were loudest and most determined in their assertions of the innocence of the Indians after prompt punishment had been administered by the military, that the Indian tribes whose names have been given were individually and collectively guilty of unprovoked and barbarous assaults on the settlers of the frontier; that they committed these depredations at the very time they were receiving arms and other presents from the Government; and that no provocation had been offered either by the Government or the defenceless citizens of the border. In other words, by those advocating the Indian side of the dispute it will be clearly established that a solemn treaty had been reluctantly entered into between the Indians and the Government, by which the demands of the Indians were complied with, and the conditions embraced in the treaty afterwards faithfully carried out on the part of the Government; and at the very time that the leading chiefs and old men of the tribes were pledging themselves and their people that “they will not attack any persons at home or travelling, or disturb any property belonging to the people of the United States, or to persons friendly therewith,” and that “they will never capture or carry off from the settlements women or children, and they will never kill or scalp white men or attempt to do them harm,” the young men and warriors of these same tribes, embracing the sons of the most prominent chiefs and signers of the treaty, were actually engaged in devastating the settlements on the Kansas frontier, murdering men, women, and children, and driving off the stock. Now to the evidence. First glance at the following brief summary of the terms of the treaty which was ratified between the Government and the Cheyennes and Arapahoes on the 19th of August, 1868, and signed and agreed to by all the chiefs of these two tribes known or claiming to be prominent, and men of influence among their own people. As the terms of the treaty are almost identical with those contained in most of the treaties made with other tribes, excepting the limits and location of reservations, it will be interesting for purposes of reference.
First. Peace and friendship shall forever continue.
Second. Whites or Indians committing wrongs to be punished according to law.
Third. The following district of country, to wit, “commencing at the point where the Arkansas river crosses the 37th parallel of north latitude; thence west on said parallel—the said line being the southern boundary of the State of Kansas—to the Cimarron river (sometimes called the Red fork of the Arkansas river); thence down said Cimarron river, in the middle of the main channel thereof, to the Arkansas river; thence up the Arkansas river in the middle of the main channel thereof to the place of beginning, is set apart for the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians.”
Fourth. The said Indians shall have the right to hunt on the unoccupied lands of the United States so long as game may be found thereon, and so long as peace subsists among the whites and Indians on the border of the hunting districts.
Fifth. Is a provision for the selection and occupation of lands for those of said Indians who desire to commence farming on said reserve, and for expenditures for their benefit.
Sixth. The United States further provides for an annual distribution of clothing for a term of years.
The treaty with the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache tribes, ratified August 25, 1868, embraced substantially the same provisions as those just quoted, excepting that relating to their reservation, which was as follows: “Commencing at a point where the Washita river crosses the 98th meridian west from Greenwich, thence up the Washita river, in the middle of the main channel thereof, to a point thirty miles west of Fort Cobb, as now established; thence due west to the north fork of Red river, provided said line strikes said river east of the 100th meridian of west longitude; if not, then only to said meridian line, and thence south on said meridian line to the said north fork of Red river; thence down said north fork, in the middle of the main channel thereof, from the point where it may be first intersected by the lines above described, to the main Red river; thence down said river, in the main channel thereof, to its intersection with the 98th meridian of longitude west from Greenwich; thence north on said meridian line to the place of beginning.”
To those who propose to follow the movements of the troops during the winter campaign of 1868–’69, it will be well to bear in mind the limits of the last named reservation, as the charge was made by the Indian agents that the military had attacked the Indians when the latter were peacefully located within the limits of their reservation.
To show that the Government through its civil agents was doing everything required of it to satisfy the Indians, and that the agent of the Cheyennes and Arapahoes was firmly of the opinion that every promise of the Government had not only been faithfully carried out, but that the Indians themselves had no complaint to make, the following letter from the agent to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs is submitted:
F L , K , August 10, 1868.
S : I have the honor to inform you that I yesterday made the whole issue of annuity goods, arms, and ammunition to the Cheyenne chiefs [the Arapahoes and Apaches had received their portion in July. G. A. C.] and people of their nation; they were delighted at receiving the goods, particularly the arms and ammunition, and never before have I known them to be better satisfied and express themselves as being so well contented previous to the issue. I made them a long speech, following your late instructions with reference to what I said to them. They have now left for their hunting-grounds, and I am perfectly satisfied that there will be no trouble with them this season, and consequently with no Indians of my agency.
I have the honor to be, with much respect, your obedient servant,
E. W. W , United States Indian Agent.
Hon. T M , Superintendent Indian Affairs.
The italics are mine, but I desire to invite attention to the confidence and strong reliance placed in these Indians by a man who was intimately associated with them, interested in their welfare,
and supposed to be able to speak authoritatively as to their character and intentions. If they could deceive him, it is not surprising that other equally well-meaning persons further east should be equally misled. The above letter is dated August 10, 1868. The following extract is from a letter written by the same party and to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, dated at same place on the 10th of September, 1868, exactly one month after his positive declaration that the Cheyennes “were perfectly satisfied, and there will be no trouble with them this season.”
Here is the extract referred to: “Subsequently I received permission from the Department to issue to them their arms and ammunition, which I accordingly did. But a short time before the issue was made a war party had started north from the Cheyenne village, on the war path against the Pawnees; and they, not knowing of the issue and smarting under their supposed wrongs, committed the outrages on the Saline river which have led to the present unfortunate aspect of affairs. The United States troops are now south of the Arkansas river in hot pursuit of the Cheyennes, the effect of which I think will be to plunge other tribes into difficulty and finally culminate in a general Indian war.” It will be observed that no justification is offered for the guilty Indians except that had they been aware of the wise and beneficent intention of the Government to issue them a fresh supply of arms, they might have delayed their murderous raid against the defenceless settlers until after the issue. Fears are also expressed that other tribes may be plunged into difficulty, but by the same witness and others it is easily established that the other tribes referred to were represented prominently in the war party which had devastated the settlements on the Saline. First I will submit an extract of a letter dated Fort Larned, August 1, 1868, from Thomas Murphy, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, to the Hon. N. G. Taylor, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Washington, D. C.:
S : I have the honor to inform you that I held a council today with the Arapahoes and Apache Indians, at which I explained to them why their arms and ammunition had been withheld; that the white settlers were now well armed and
determined that no more raids should be made through their country by large bodies of Indians; and that while the whites were friendly and well disposed toward the Indians, yet if the Indians attempted another raid such as they recently made on the Kaw reservation, I feared themselves and the whites would have a fight, and that it would bring on war.
The head chief of the Arapahoes, Little Raven, replied “that no more trips would be made by his people into the settlements: that their hearts were good toward the whites, and they wished to remain at peace with them.” I told him I would now give them their arms and ammunition; that I hoped they would use them for the sole purpose of securing food for themselves and families, and that in no case would I ever hear of their using these arms against their white brethren. Little Raven and the other chiefs then promised that these arms should never be used against the whites, and Agent Wynkoop then delivered to the Arapahoes one hundred pistols, eighty Lancaster rifles, twelve kegs of powder, one and one-half kegs of lead, and fifteen thousand caps; and to the Apaches he gave forty pistols, twenty Lancaster rifles, three kegs of powder, one-half keg of lead, and five thousand caps, for which they seemed much pleased.... I would have remained here to see the Cheyennes did I deem it important to do so. From what I can learn there will be no trouble whatever with them. They will come here, get their ammunition and leave immediately to hunt buffalo. They are well and peacefully disposed toward the whites, and, unless some unlooked-for event should transpire to change their present feelings, they will keep their treaty pledges.
This certainly reads well, and at Washington or further east would be regarded as a favorable indication of the desire for peace on the part of the Indians. The reader is asked to remember that the foregoing letters and extracts are from professed friends of the Indian and advocates of what is known as the peace policy. The letter of Superintendent Murphy was written the day of council, August 1. Mark his words of advice to Little Raven as to how the
arms were to be used, and note Little Raven’s reply containing his strong promises of maintaining friendly relations with the whites. Yet the second night following the issue of arms, a combined war party of Cheyennes and Arapahoes, numbering over two hundred warriors, almost the exact number of pistols issued at the council, left the Indian village to inaugurate a bloody raid in the Kansas settlements; and among the Arapahoes was the son of Little Raven. By reading the speech made by this chief in the council referred to by Mr. Murphy, a marked resemblance will be detected to the stereotyped responses delivered by Indian chiefs visiting the authorities at Washington, or when imposing upon the credulous and kind-hearted people who assemble at Cooper Institute periodically to listen to these untutored orators of the plains. The statements and promises uttered in the one instance are fully as reliable as those listened to so breathlessly in the others. Regarding the raid made by the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, it will be considered sufficient perhaps when I base my statements upon the following “Report of an interview between Colonel E. W. Wynkoop, United States Indian Agent, and Little Rock, a Cheyenne chief, held at Fort Larned, Kansas, August 19, 1868, in the presence of Lieutenant S. M. Robbins, Seventh United States Cavalry, John S. Smith, United States interpreter, and James Morrison, scout for Indian agency.”
Question by Colonel Wynkoop: “Six nights ago I spoke to you in regard to depredations committed on the Saline. I told you to go and find out by whom these depredations were committed and to bring me straight news. What news do you bring?”
Little Rock: “I took your advice and went there. I am now here to tell you all I know This war party of Cheyennes which left the camp of these tribes above the forks of Walnut creek about the 2d or 3d of August, went out against the Pawnees, crossed the Smoky Hill about Fort Hays, and thence proceeded to the Saline, where there were ten lodges of Sioux in the Cheyenne camp when this war party left, and about twenty men of them and four Arapahoes accompanied the party. The Cheyennes numbered about two hundred; nearly all the young men in the village went; Little Raven’s son was one of the four Arapahoes. When the party reached the Saline they turned down the
stream, with the exception of twenty, who, being fearful of depredations being committed against the whites by the party going in the direction of the settlements, kept on north toward the Pawnees. The main party continued down the Saline until they came in sight of the settlement; they then camped there. A Cheyenne named Oh-e-ah-mo-he-a, a brother of White Antelope, who was killed at Sand Creek, and another named Red Nose, proceeded to the first house; they afterwards returned to the camp and with them a woman captive. The main party was surprised at this action, and forcibly took possession of her, and returned her to her house. The two Indians had outraged the woman before they brought her to the camp. After the outrage had been committed, the parties left the Saline and went north toward the settlement of the south fork of the Solomon, where they were kindly received and fed by the white people. They left the settlements on the south fork and proceeded toward the settlements on the north fork. When in sight of these settlements, they came upon a body of armed settlers, who fired upon them; they avoided the party, went around them, and approached a house some distance off. In the vicinity of the house they came upon a white man alone upon the prairie. Big Head’s son D rode at him and knocked him down with a club. The Indian who had committed the outrage upon the white woman, known as White Antelope’s brother, then fired upon the white man without effect, while the third Indian rode up and killed him. Soon after they killed a white man, and, close by, a woman—all in the same settlement. At the time these people were killed, the party was divided in feeling, the majority being opposed to any outrages being committed; but finding it useless to contend against these outrages being committed without bringing on a strife among themselves, they gave way and all went in together. They then went to another house in the same settlement, and there killed two men and took two little girls prisoners; this on the same day. After committing this last outrage the party turned south toward the Saline, where they came upon a body of mounted troops; the troops immediately charged the Indians, and the pursuit was continued a long time. The Indians having the two children, their horses becoming fatigued, dropped the children without hurting them. Soon after the children were dropped the
pursuit ceased; but the Indians continued on up the Saline. A portion of the Indians afterward returned to look for the children, but they were unable to find them. After they had proceeded some distance up the Saline, the party divided, the majority going north toward the settlements on the Solomon, but thirty of them started toward their village, supposed to be some distance northwest of Fort Larned. Another small party returned to Black Kettle’s village, from which party I got this information.E I am fearful that before this time the party that started north had committed a great many depredations.”
D Afterward captured by my command and killed in a difficulty with the guard at Fort Hays, Kansas, in the summer of 1869.
E Little Rock was a chief of Black Kettle’s band of Cheyennes, and second in rank to Black Kettle.
Question by Colonel Wynkoop: “Do you know the names of the principal men of this party that committed the depredations, besides White Antelope’s brother?”
Answer by Little Rock: “There were Medicine Arrow’s oldest son, named Tall Wolf; Red Nose, who was one of the men who outraged the woman, Big Head’s son named Porcupine Bear; and Sand Hill’s brother, known as the Bear that Goes Ahead.”
Question by Colonel Wynkoop: “You told me your nation wants peace; will you, in accordance with your treaty stipulations, deliver up the men whom you have named as being the leaders of the party who committed the outrages named?”
Answer by Little Rock: “I think that the only men who ought to suffer and be responsible for these outrages are White Antelope’s brother and Red Nose, the men who ravished the woman; and when
I return to the Cheyenne camp and assemble the chiefs and head men, I think those two men will be delivered up to you.”
Question by Colonel Wynkoop: “I consider the whole party guilty; but it being impossible to punish all of them, I hold the principal men, whom you mentioned, responsible for all. They had no right to be led and governed by two men. If no depredations had been committed after the outrage on the woman, the two men whom you have mentioned alone would have been guilty.”
Answer by Little Rock: “After your explanation I think your demand for the men is right. I am willing to deliver them up, and will go back to the tribe and use my best endeavors to have them surrendered. I am but one man, and cannot answer for the entire nation.”
Other questions and answers of similar import followed.
The terms of the interview between Colonel Wynkoop and Little Rock were carefully noted down and transmitted regularly to his next superior officer, Superintendent Murphy, who but a few days previous, and within the same month, had officially reported to the Indian Commissioner at Washington that peace and good will reigned undisturbed between the Indians under his charge and the whites. Even he, with his strong leaning toward the adoption of morbid measures of a peaceful character, and his disinclination to believe the Indians could meditate evil toward their white neighbors, was forced, as his next letter shows, to alter his views.
O S
I A , A , K , August 22, 1868.
S : I have the honor herewith to transmit a letter of the 19th inst. from Agent Wynkoop, enclosing report of a talk which he had with Little Rock, a Cheyenne chief, whom he had sent to ascertain the facts relative to the recent troubles on the Solomon and Saline rivers, in this State. The agent’s letter and report are full, and explain themselves. I fully concur in the views expressed by the agent that the innocent Indians, who are trying to keep, in good faith, their treaty pledges, be protected in the
manner indicated by him, while I earnestly recommend that the Indians who have committed these gross outrages be turned over to the military, and that they be severely punished. When I reflect that at the very time these Indians were making such loud professions of friendship at Larned, receiving their annuities, etc., they were then contemplating and planning this campaign, I can no longer have confidence in what they say or promise. War is surely upon us, and in view of the importance of the case, I earnestly recommend that Agent Wynkoop be furnished promptly with the views of the Department, and that full instructions be given him for his future action.
Very respectfully, your obedient servant, (Signed) T M , Superintendent Indian Affairs.
Hon. C. E. M , Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Washington, D. C.
What were the recommendations of Agent Wynkoop referred to in Mr. Murphy’s letter? They were as follows: “Let me take those Indians whom I know to be guiltless and desirous of remaining at peace, and locate them with their lodges and families at some good place that I may select in the vicinity of this post (Larned); and let those Indians be entirely subsisted by the Government until this trouble is over, and be kept within certain bounds; and let me be furnished with a small battalion of United States troops, for the purpose of protecting them from their own people, and from being forced by them into war; let those who refuse to respond to my call and come within the bounds prescribed, be considered at war, and let them be properly punished. By this means, if war takes place— which I consider inevitable—we can be able to discriminate between those who deserve punishment and those who do not; otherwise it will be a matter of impossibility.”
This proposition seems, from its wording, to be not only a feasible one, but based on principles of justice to all concerned, and
no doubt would be so interpreted by the theorizers on the Indian question who study its merits from afar. Before acting upon Colonel Wynkoop’s plan, it was in the regular order referred to General Sherman, at that time commanding the Military Division of the Missouri, in which the Indians referred to were located. His indorsement in reply briefly disposed of the proposition by exposing its absurdity:
H M D M , S . L , M , September 19, 1868.
I now regard the Cheyennes and Arapahoes at war, and that it will be impossible for our troops to discriminate between the well-disposed and the warlike parts of these bands, unless an absolute separation be made. I prefer that the agents collect all of the former and conduct them to their reservation within the Indian territory south of Kansas, there to be provided for under their supervision, say about old Fort Cobb. I cannot consent to their being collected and held near Fort Larned. So long as Agent Wynkoop remains at Fort Larned the vagabond part of the Indians will cluster about him for support, and to beg of the military. The vital part of these tribes are committing murders and robberies from Kansas to Colorado, and it is an excess of generosity on our part to be feeding and supplying the old, young, and feeble, while their young men are at war.
I do not pretend to say what should be done with these, but it will simplify our game of war, already complicated enough, by removing them well away from our field of operations.
I have the honor to be, your obedient servant,
(Signed) W. T. S , Lieutenant-General, commanding.
Again, on the 26th of the same month, General Sherman, in a letter to General Schofield, then Secretary of War, writes: “The
