“Classica Africana”: Black American Participation in Nineteenth-Century Classicism

As Antiquities & America illustrates, classicism permeated the United States from the nation’s origins in the eighteenth century. Attention to the classics made its way into educational systems, public and private library collections, architecture, decorative arts, and fine arts. Regardless of the countless opportunities available to engage with the classics, these avenues were not accessible to the majority of Black Americans across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially before the Civil War. Several barriers prevented Black Americans from engaging with classicism: the enslavement of Africans and African Americans; laws prohibiting the education of enslaved people; and prevailing beliefs about the “inherent” inferiority of Black people. Despite this late bloom of Black classicism, also known as “Classica Africana,” there were some individuals engaged with the classics throughout the antebellum period (1815–1861). Frederick Douglass’s library collection and Edmonia Lewis’s artistic practice offer us two opportunities to explore the various ways Black Americans participated in classicism and allow us to examine their motivations.

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) began engaging with classicism at an early age, and his participation evolved throughout his lifetime. Born enslaved, he quickly learned the value of literacy and oratory speech and their connection to freedom. To begin his self-education, Douglass bought Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator (1817), a collection of political speeches, dialogues, and essays from the ancient and modern past. In Douglass’s 1845 memoir, he recalled reading The Columbian Orator every chance he had. Among the pages he read were several passages recounting ancient history, including “Speech of a Roman General” by P. Emilius; “Speech before the Roman Senate” by Cato; and an extract from Cicero’s “Oration against Catiline.” According to historian Margaret Malamud, “the study of classical and neo-classical oratory remained an essential component of rhetorical education in schools, academies, and colleges.” These educational institutions often barred access to Black Americans. In Douglass’s case, his independent study of The Columbian Orator allowed him to learn oratorical skills that he would later utilize for public speeches and debates advocating for abolitionism.

Douglass’s private library collection at Cedar Hill, his home in Anacostia, Washington, DC, contained two copies of The Columbian Orator. Also contained in Douglass’s library were various books published across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including translations of classical epics, accounts of ancient history, Greek and Latin language textbooks and dictionaries, classical orations, and books detailing the culture and art of the ancient Mediterranean. Of note among his collection are two books: Karl Baedeker’s Egypt, Handbook for Travelers (1885) and Martin R. Delaney’s Principia of Ethnology: the Origin of Races and Color, with an Archeological Compendium of Ethiopian and Egyptian Civilization (1879). Principia of Ethnology looked to archaeological evidence to draw connections between ancient Egypt and modern peoples of African descent. Egypt, Handbook for Travelers offered travelers on the Grand Tour a guide for navigating modern Egypt as well as a history on ancient sites. Some nineteenth-century African Americans and abolitionists declared that ancient Egypt was the progenitor of modern-day African Americans. They often used the history, imagery, and material culture of the ancient Mediterranean to support their arguments. During this period, African Americans and abolitionists also argued that Egypt was the true cradle of Western civilization and informed Greek and Roman culture.

Frederick Douglass had a particular interest in engaging with ancient Egypt and visiting the country. Douglass supported arguments for African Americans’ cultural and historical ties to ancient Egypt and Carthage. While traveling through Europe on his own version of the Grand Tour (1886–1887) and visiting ancient sites in Italy, Douglass expressed his desire to travel to Egypt, though not just to visit the ruins. Douglass wrote:

 “I confess, however, that my desire to visit Egypt did not rest entirely upon the basis thus foreshadowed. I had a motive far less enthusiastic and sentimental; an ethnological purpose in the pursuit of which, I hoped to turn my visit to some account in combatting American prejudice against the darker colored races of mankind, and at the same time to raise colored people somewhat in their own estimation and thus stimulate them to higher endeavors. I had a theory, for which I wanted the support of facts in the range of my own knowledge.”

Ultimately his travels did not fully support his initial theory, though he described modern Egyptians’ skin tone as closer to fairer-skinned Black Americans.

Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907) followed a different trajectory toward classicism. Lewis was influenced primarily by the artistic and material legacy of ancient Greece and Rome. Born a free Black and Anishinaabe/Ojibwa woman, Lewis benefited from her brother’s support of her formal education in both secondary school and at Oberlin College, one of the few colleges that accepted women and Black students. Lewis was enrolled in Oberlin’s Young Ladies Department, which offered beginning Latin and line drawing. While at Oberlin, Lewis received art training that most likely consisted of drawing from plaster casts, which often derived from copies of Greco-Roman sculptures.

Lewis ultimately settled in Rome as a next step in her artistic development. Rome was a hub for American sculptors like Edmonia Lewis due to the abundance of ancient Roman art and marble—the preferred medium for neoclassical sculpture. Lewis adapted formal classical elements like contrapposto and frontal composition to her sculptures, which frequently emphasized American history and themes. Such is the case in Forever Free (1867), where Lewis depicts a subdued moment of celebration and optimism after emancipation. Ancient history and collections of antiquities also informed Lewis’s practice.

In The Death of Cleopatra (1875), Lewis chose a subject embroiled in debate. Nineteenth-century Americans questioned Cleopatra’s ethnicity and her connection to ancient Egypt. While some claimed that Cleopatra was of Greek ancestry, others argued that Cleopatra had Egyptian, and therefore African, ancestry. While this continued throughout the nineteenth century, Edmonia Lewis chose to sculpt Cleopatra after ancient coins that circulated during the queen’s reign. One reviewer commented on Lewis’s depiction of Cleopatra: “Miss Lewis, on the other hand, followed the coins, medals, and other authentic records in giving her Cleopatra an aquiline nose and prominent chin of the Roman type, for the Egyptian Queen appears to have had such features rather than such as would more positively suggest her Grecian descent.” Art historians Charmaine Nelson and Kirsten Pai Buick offer possible motivations behind Lewis’s use of ancient evidence to derive her white or Greek depiction of Cleopatra. Nelson argues that this was Lewis’s way of separating her identity from her sculptural work while Buick suggests that Lewis understood the stakes of rendering a “Black Cleopatra” and chose a different approach. Regardless of her reasoning, tangible classical resources provided Lewis the opportunity to develop her own representation of the ancient queen.

Frederick Douglass and Edmonia Lewis are two examples of Black Americans participating in the culture of American classicism albeit for varied reasons. Frederick Douglass’s self-taught engagement with classics symbolized his desire to participate fully in American culture on his own terms. Douglass invoked classical language, literature, and oratory speech for abolitionist arguments and to understand present-day conditions of the new American Republic. He looked to ancient Egypt for a cultural lineage while also pursuing full rights and freedoms afforded to white Americans. Lewis, on the other hand, benefited from a formal education in the liberal arts, which drew heavily from classical languages and art. As a sculptor versed in neoclassicism, her decision to live in Rome allowed her to view classical art available in the region and consult collections that housed ancient material culture. These collections, and Greco-Roman art in general, informed her sculptural work, which bridged neoclassical elements with American subject matter. Nineteenth-century debates regarding the utility of a classical education circulated among African Americans, as people advocated for practical training over a liberal arts education. Within this discourse, individuals like Douglass and Lewis provide examples of how Black Americans could participate in classicism and demonstrate how valuable the classics were to the pursuit of emancipation, freedom, intellectualism, and creative expression.