Melodramas of Rebellion: Metamora and the Literary Historiography of King Philip's War in the 1820s

GORDON SAYRE Melodramas of Rebellion: Metamora and the Literary Historiography of King Philip's War in the 1820s "It is not now a time to talk of aught But chains, or conquest, liberty, or death" Cato, in Joseph Addison's Cato (1712) 2.4.79-80 "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death" Patrick Henry in the Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775 "Death! Death! Or my nation's freedom!" Metamora, in Stone's Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829) 5.3.75 etamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags marked the height of a craze for Indian chiefs as tragic heroes on the American stage. Beginning with John Nelson Barker's 1808 dramatization of the Pocahontas myth, The Indian Princess, or, La BeUe Sauvage, an Operatic Meio-Drame, and continuing through the 1840s, at least seventy-five such plays were written in the nineteenth-century United States (Moody, "Introduction" 203), but only one achieved lasting success. "Metamora was the Indian drama of the nineteeth-century American theatre," wrote theater historian Richard Moody, and through it Metacom , the actual name of the Wampanoag leader, became the Indian Arizona Quarterly Volume 6o, Number 2, Summer 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 M 2 Gordon Sayre hero ("Lost and Now Found" 354). There were in fact eight separate plays about Metacom written and performed between 1822 and 1894 (Jones 66), but only Metamora survives. John Augustus Stone's drama won a prize competition sponsored by twenty-three-year-old Edwin Forrest, who became exclusive owner of the work and played the lead in hundreds of performances during a superstar career that continued into the 1860s. Metamora thus became the most popular role of the most popular actor in the nineteenth-century United States. A series of recent critical studies of Metamora and of Edwin Forrest have emphasized how this play about King Philip's War of 1675-76, the bloodiest frontier conflict in Anglo-American history, reflected contemporary political concerns about Indian relations. The play premiered in New York on December 15, 1829, exactly one week after President Andrew Jackson, in his first annual address to Congress, articulated his policy of Indian Removal. Jill Lepore asks rhetorically: "Did the same forces that brought thousands of Americans to see Metamora also lead them to support sending thousands of Cherokees to Oklahoma?" (193). Her answer is 'yes>' and Scott C. Martin, Teresa Strouth Gaul, Jeffrey Mason, and B. Donald Grose, in separate articles on the play, all agree that the stereotype of the vanishing Indian, personified in Metamora, helped to justify what many white Americans believed to be an inevitable process of terminating the sovereignty of native peoples. But these readings gloss over the fact that there was substantial opposition to Indian Removal at the time, and that the relationship between the play's politics and the nation's Indian policy was and is far from obvious.1 I wish to propose a different interpretation of the play, one that takes seriously the figure ofMetamora as heroic political leader whose rebellion was justified by the same ideologies articulated in histories of the United States' own revolution against England. Moreover, 1 will show how the plot of the play closely follows that of several historical romances published in the 1820s, all of which linked the cause of Indian sovereignty to the fate of a melodramatic heroine. Metacom, whom the English called King Philip, had the fortune to live in New England and to schedule his uprising with portentous coincidence . As James Fenimore Cooper wrote, "the first blow was struck in June, 1675 . . . just a century before blood was drawn in the contest that separated the colonies from the mother country" (preface to Wept, xi). According to the historiographie style of Puritan New England and of Melodramas of Rebellion 3 the 1820s, King Philip's War became a typological figure for the War of American Independence.2 As the epigraphs above suggest, the rhetoric of...