The Life and Death of Anna Gardie: American Theater, Refugee Dramas, and the Specter of Haitian Revolution

On July 21, 1798, New York City newspapers reported a “complicated murder and suicide” that had occurred early on the morning of July 20, 1798 (“Melancholy Catastrophe”). Anna Gardie, a well-known actress from Saint Domingue, was killed by her husband, whose subsequent suicide left behind a young orphaned son. A sensational real-life tragedy, Anna Gardie’s life and death also became part of a larger history of Atlantic revolution, Haiti and its refugees, and transnational performance cultures. She debuted on Saint Domingue’s colonial stages before crossing the Atlantic and finding success in France. During the French Revolution, she retraced her path to Saint Domingue before finally fleeing northward during the Haitian Revolution. Once in the United States, she had reinvented herself as a popular dancer, singer, and pantomimist, her celebrity shaped by partly suppressed, ambiguous associations with foreign revolutions.¹ Occurring against the backdrop of the XYZ affair, the 1798 Quasi-War with France, and the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, Gardie’s appearance in the historical record highlights the ambivalent, shifting sympathies and anxieties with which Americans greeted French Atlantic culture during the 1790s. Gardie’s life and death also point to the profound impact of the Haitian Revolution on American performance practices from the 1790s to the 1830s.

Anna Gardie and other refugees from the Haitian Revolution helped forge what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has characterized as a “creole commons,” with spaces and publics organized around emergent identities and performance practices in the age of Atlantic revolution (26). Performing refugees brought distinctive Creole theatrical practices to US stages and other public spaces—intercultural forms such as pantomime, melodrama, and racial masking. Foregrounding the processes of substitution or “surrogation” that Joseph Roach discusses in Cities of the Dead, Gardie and her fellow refugees in the 1790s became popular, sentimentalized, and theatrically appealing embodiments of Saint Domingue’s revolutionary history, and American audiences responded to their performances of material loss and cultural prestige with their own mix of aspirations and anxieties (2).

Gardie’s story survived beyond the revolutionary era; it was revived in the 1830s, decades after her death and after the Haitian Revolution, when stage manager, playwright, and early American cultural historian William Dunlap recounted her tragic end in his 1832 History of the American Theatre. In Dunlap’s historical account, Gardie’s death and the nostalgic scene of Haitian refugee performance returned as a cryptic but symbolically rich story of Caribbean slave revolution’s haunting influences on US culture. Dunlap’s History revived Haiti’s dramatic refugees in order to bolster a narrative of American culture’s dangerously transnational origins and its subsequent maturation. Nostalgically invoking the tragedies of Saint Domingue’s refugee actors, Dunlap offered Gardie and her compatriots as a lesson on the enduring dangers of America’s interracial intimacies.

Tragedy in the french boarding house

The first detailed report of the Gardie murder-suicide appeared in the New York Weekly Museum for July 21, which described the “dreadful circumstance” that had occurred between three and four in the morning of July 20 (“Saturday”). Another account elaborated on the location, calling it a “noted French boarding-house” at Pearl and Broad Streets (“Jealousy!”). Gradually accumulating more details, the accounts reconstructed a lurid, dramatic, and mysterious irruption of violence. Monsieur Gardie (whose given name is no longer known), the Weekly Museum reported,

got up, ordered the boy to rise, and got into her bed. The boy hearing his mother cry out, asked what was the matter? Mr[.] Gardie desired him to lie still; his mother had only fainted—Soon after, hearing a knocking against the partition, he got up and went to the bed, where he found Mr. Gardie in the agonies of death, and his mother lying dead in the bed.

It appears that he stabbed her with a new carving knife in the left breast, which penetrated immediately to the heart, as she appears to have expired instantly. He was wounded in the breast, in two places, with his own hand; and must...