John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles
Audubon booked passage for his son to cross the Atlantic on the American brig Hope. He also provided his son with another sort of hope, arranging for a passport that described the teenaged boy as a “citizen of Louisiana,” thus helping him dodge conscription and the unhappy prospect of being sent back to Saint-Domingue, the real place of his birth, as a soldier.
In the following year, 1804, the “negro insurrection” eventually enabled Saint-Domingue’s people of color to gain their freedom from European colonizers. By that time, the movement from insurrection to independence had come to represent a menacing specter of black power for white people on both sides of the Atlantic, and the residual racial anxiety endured well into the century. Audubon had to know that. No matter what he knew about his early days in Saint-Domingue, he also knew that, as someone with a Haitian association in his background, he clearly needed to establish himself on the white side of the racial divide. Thus in his memoir, “Myself,” Audubon plays loose with the dates and details. His beautiful “Spanish” mother dies as a victim of the slaves’ violence, he writes, and he and his father have to flee to France to escape the uprising—along with their black “servants,” to be sure. Time is out of joint in Audubon’s story—the slave insurrection did not begin until 1791, but his mother actually died in 1785, soon after his birth, and his father sent the three-year-old boy to France in 1788—but chronology is not the issue. The more important point is to portray his family—and therefore himself—as white victims of the black unrest.
In the end, the task is not to seek some essential, absolute truth about who Audubon really was, how “American” he was, or what sort of American he was, black or white, or whether he might have passed for white. Both in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world and in twenty-first-century scholarship, questions about someone’s exact identity can often lead back to ambiguity, even with DNA-based findings. The point, rather, is to accept ambiguity as a possible element of individual identity and to see what the individual does with it. In Audubon’s case, the ambiguity of his background—not to mention his inventive, often evasive, sometimes duplicitous discussion of his origins—offers a valuable avenue of biographical approach. As Robert Penn Warren wrote in the preface to his poem Audubon: A Vision, “By the age of ten Audubon knew the true story, but prompted, it would seem, by a variety of impulses, including some sound practical ones, he encouraged the other version, along with a number of flattering embellishments.” Whatever the “true story” of Audubon’s background might have been, the real fascination still lies in the “embellishments,” including Audubon’s role as, to use Warren’s term, a “fantasist of talent.”39
Audubon kept up the deception throughout his life. In 1837, when he had become a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic, he wrote to a close friend, “I am glad, and proud Too; that I have at last been Acknowledged by the public prints as a Native Citizen of Louisianna.”40 For his own part, he never took to the public prints to acknowledge his own West Indian origins, nor did he discuss the larger geopolitical implications that might be attached to his place of origin. He offered only a simple explanation in the privacy of his personal memoir, noting that his father “found it necessary to send me back to my own beloved country, the United States of America.”41 In that regard, Audubon was coming “back” to a place he had never been. The United States, his “beloved country,” had indeed acquired Louisiana, allegedly the place of his birth, but he would not set foot in Louisiana until 1819, sixteen years later. Instead, he first came ashore in the United States in late August 1803, when the Hope docked in New York City.42
It turned out to be a bad time to arrive. Audubon immediately came down with a case of yellow fever, an epidemic disease that swept through the city between mid-July and late October, sickening over 1,600 people and killing upward of 700. At the time, physicians debated the origins of yellow fever, some saying that it stemmed from urban filth, particularly decomposing animal and vegetable matter in hot weather, with others arguing that it came in from outside the country. We now know that the latter explanation makes more sense: Yellow fever is a mosquito-borne illness that first came into North American seaports on ships from the West Indies, including Saint-Domingue.43 Luckily enough, Audubon survived yellow fever, thus gaining a lifetime immunity. Still, he never noted the obvious irony of his illness. Before this West Indian–born, French-speaking immigrant could begin to fashion a new identity as an American—and eventually, as the American Woodsman—he first had to recover from a malady that stemmed, quite unpleasantly, from the place of his origin, the French West Indies. Try as Audubon might, there was no escaping the specter of Saint-Domingue.
Chapter 2
Hearing Birds, Heeding Their Call
At a very early period of my life I arrived in the United States of America, where, prompted by an innate desire to acquire a thorough knowledge of the birds of this happy country, I formed the resolution, immediately on my landing, to spend, if not all my time in that study, at least all that portion generally called leisure, and to draw each individual of its natural size and colouring.
—John James Audubon, “Account of the Method of Drawing Birds”
Audubon’s father didn’t send his son to America to become a bird artist. In addition to getting him well beyond Napoleon’s militaristic reach, he had a much more prosaic plan in mind. He wanted the teenaged boy to learn to speak and write better English, which could be a useful skill for another task that might soon be at hand: helping to manage Mill Grove, a Pennsylvania farm that the elder Audubon had acquired in 1789. Audubon père could hope that, with some combination of guidance and experience, his son would someday become a capable overseer of the Mill Grove operation; he at least assumed that the boy could benefit from the combination of responsibility and opportunity the place provided. He sent him off to America, then, with a letter of credit and a connection to a well-trusted local agent, giving him just the sort of support a young man might need for a promising start in the new nation.
Looking back some years later on that American beginning, Audubon clearly appreciated his father’s sending him to the Pennsylvania farm. He wrote fondly of his early days at Mill Grove, embracing the place as a “blessed spot” as he looked upon the work his father had done years before, “the even fences round the fields, or on the regular manner with which avenues of trees, as well as the orchards, had been planted by his hand.”1 In fact, that work had been done by the hand of a tenant, who had also discovered lead deposits underground sometime in the 1790s, giving an additional dimension to Mill Grove. Lead wasn’t as good as gold, but in a bullet-hungry hunting country like the United States, such a mineral bonus could certainly be a substantial asset. With the promising combination of land and lead, then, everything seemed quite well laid out for young Audubon, just waiting for him to make it even better.
Unfortunately, however—or, perhaps fortunately, given his eventual artistic success—Audubon had neither head nor heart for farm management, and he never made the most of the opportunity his father first offered. By his own account, he never made much of the various other business ventures he pursued during his first two decades in the United States. All he really wanted, he insisted, was to become a bird artist.
The Precarious Calling of Art
Becoming an artist of any sort has always been a low-percentage career move, particularly in an upstart place like the early nineteenth-century United States. The number of painters who became reasonably prominent at the time could probably be counted on two hands, and those who gained lasting significance on one. We might think immediately of John Singleton Copley (1738–1815) in the second half of the eighteenth century and Washington Allston (1779–1843), Thomas Cole (1801–1848), and Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) in the first half of the nineteenth, all of whom followed different paths to their profession. Copley, for instance, grew up in a poor Boston household headed by a widowed mother, an Irish immigrant who ran a tobacco shop, but he taught himself to paint well enough to make a comfortable living by making exquisite portraits of middle-class New Englanders in the era of the American Revolution. The American colonies, however, had neither the