Edmonia Lewis' War Work

At the outset of her career in 1864, Edmonia Lewis created a number of portrait medallions, statuettes, and busts of abolitionists and Civil War heroes. Cast in plaster, they featured the likenesses of prominent figures including John Brown, Wendell Phillips, William H. Carney, and Robert Gould Shaw. Scholarly understandings of these early works have remained fairly straightforward: Lewis marketed and sold them to a circle of largely white abolitionist patrons in New England and as a result was able to move to Italy and propel her career to international heights. Yet the promotion of these sculptures across a variety of contexts – at antislavery meetings and soldiers’ relief fairs as well as in the black press around the country – suggests a more multidimensional narrative of spaces and actors meaningful to the circulation of Lewis’ work. This paper remaps the coordinates of Lewis’ sculptures by situating them within a network of black women’s entrepreneurship and activism in Civil War-era Boston, and in particular a set of relief efforts that the historian Martha S. Jones has elsewhere termed “war work.” Focusing on Lewis’ participation in two fairs – the Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Fair and the National Sailors’ Fair – it considers the public politics of black women’s making, labor, and care as the fate of slavery and African American citizenship hung in the balance of war.