Consider the fourth member of Bordewich’s quartet: the Black sculptor Edmonia Lewis, who claimed to be part Chippewa and who shared with Bell and Scott “the spirit of a rapidly changing America that celebrated self-invention, unshackled entrepreneurship, and creative individualism.” A savvy entrepreneur who knew how to exploit (or fictionalize) her background, she evidently desired to live “as an artist and as a free woman, who happened incidentally to be Black, or Indian when called for.” By 1870 she was wealthy, her work was in great demand, she had been awarded a gold medal by King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, and her studio, near the Piazza Barberini, was a must-see for Americans visiting Rome.
For the Centennial Exhibition, she produced The Death of Cleopatra, which apparently Howells somehow missed. Weighing more than three thousand pounds and more than five feet high, Lewis’s Cleopatra was dying slumped on her throne, the deadly asp in her hand. Bordewich notes that this Cleopatra was “racially ambitious” like Lewis, “with classically European features and with no obvious reference to her ‘African’ aspect.” (One viewer thought she looked Jewish.) Lewis wanted $30,000 for the sculpture. It did not sell.
While the writer Lydia Maria Child hopefully saw in Lewis “how the lines of demarcation between classes and races are melting away,” Bordewich regards the sculptor’s decision to spend her life abroad as an indictment of America. “The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor,” Lewis explained in 1878. “Her life was daring and original, but she could not live it in the land of her birth,” Bordewich adds. “Negotiating a path between the abolitionist and the post-Reconstruction future,” Lewis had to know that to be judged by her work alone was “a perhaps impossible ambition in the America of the late 1870s.”
Still, even if the Centennial Exhibition was more self-congratulatory than self-critical, more commercial than collaborative, it couldn’t really camouflage the demand for a nation more fair, more just, and more in line with the sentiments of 1776. Bordewich shrewdly notes that on the morning of July 4, 1876, as political and military luminaries as well as international guests sat on the main stage in front of Independence Hall to celebrate and Robert E. Lee’s cousin read from the Declaration of Independence, Susan B. Anthony and four other women marched up to the platform to hand over an alternative “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States, July 4, 1876.” At Independence Square, Anthony then read:
The history of our country the past hundred years has been a series of assumptions and usurpations of power over woman. For the violation of these fundamental principles of our government, we arraign our rules on the Fourth day of July, 1876.