From obscurity to national icon: memorializing Stephen C. Foster in the 1890s

ABSTRACT

Although he would come to be seen as the “father of American music,” Stephen Collins Foster (1826–1864) was mostly unknown until 1900, when a statue by Giuseppe Moretti was erected in Pittsburgh depicting the composer seated above an enslaved man and transcribing the music he performs. This essay explores the historical meanings of the monument by analyzing private and public writings from its genesis, fundraising campaign, and unveiling, situating the statue within the songwriter’s family’s efforts to shape public memory and the larger political context of reconciliation between North and South after the Civil War.

KEYWORDS:

• Music
• monuments
• statues
• commemoration

Now widely considered the “father of American music,” Stephen Collins Foster (1826–1864) was an obscure figure for thirty years after his death.¹ During his lifetime, several of his roughly 200 songs spread across the globe, and his sheet music sat on pianos in thousands of homes. But because he was not a performer, and because no American songwriter had been a widely celebrated artist, relatively few people knew his name. As Emily Bingham frankly states, “For all his hits, Stephen Foster was no celebrity.”² Moreover, despite posthumous proclamations to the contrary, during his lifetime Foster’s music was not particularly national. He sold large quantities of sheet music, but, as Candace Bailey has documented, in the South his music was “not missing altogether, but hardly ubiquitous.”³ Even in the North the popularity of his music began declining in the last few years of his life. He died virtually penniless in New York.

Bailey notes that “the rise of Foster’s compositions as the epitome of American song aligns with a new spirit of the nation that arose in the last third of the nineteenth century.”⁴ Indeed, the royalty statements from Foster’s sheet music reveal only modest sales into the 1890s, at which point only about six of his songs remained in public consciousness, largely without knowledge of their composer.⁵ This dramatically changed by the turn of the century, when an effort to erect a statue of Foster in his native Pittsburgh helped transform him into a national symbol, celebrated by a geographically, ideologically, economically, and racially diverse cross-section of Americans.

Although Foster composed in many styles and genres, the six songs that were still generally known thirty years after his death – “Old Folks at Home,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Massa’s in de Cold Ground,” “Old Black Joe,” “Nelly Was A Lady,” and “Uncle Ned” – were all sentimental blackface minstrel songs. These songs, as well as the collective forgetting of his other music, comprised the intellectual foundation of the 1890s Foster revival. They engaged with the hottest political issue of Foster’s day – slavery – but cleverly avoided partisanship while simultaneously hinting at multiple political readings. In “Old Folks at Home,” for example, a freed man nostalgically remembers his younger days with family and friends in bondage. As Sarah Meer points out, the song is unclear about where the nostalgia is directed:

Is it (politically neutrally) for a place, time and people; is it (an antislavery) longing for the family and home from which the singer has been cruelly parted; or is it a yearning for a return to the social relations of slavery itself?⁶

Central to this ambiguity were the songs’ sympathetic portrayals of enslaved and freed people. The texts humanize their subjects by expressing intense emotions, such as love, nostalgia, and longing for home and family. In Foster’s best songs the emotional expression is deepened by folk-like but lyrical, sweeping melodies that rise and fall to articulate emotional high points. Such musical portraits could, as escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass pointed out, “awaken the sympathies for the slave, in which antislavery principles take root, grow, and flourish.”⁷ But Saidiya V. Hartman reveals that sympathy was also deployed by defenders of enslavement to portray the institution as benevolent, and thus “the recognition of humanity and individuality acted to tether, bind, and oppress.”⁸ Sympathy itself, then, was apolitical, and as such was invoked by people on all sides of the slavery debate. For this reason, in the composer’s lifetime Foster’s songs were inserted into pro-slavery, anti-slavery, and neutral antebellum performances, and they sold across sectional and political divides, primarily in the Northern states and the slave states that bordered them.⁹

The idea to erect a statue of Foster in Pittsburgh came from two Pittsburgh locals – the composer’s brother Morrison Foster and newspaper editor Thomas J. Keenan Jr. – who seem to have sensed that the malleability of these songs suited them for the politics of sectional reconciliation in the 1890s. In the white South, the mythology of the Lost Cause had formed quickly after the Civil War, asserting the constitutionality of secession, downplaying slavery as a cause of the war, and portraying the rebellion as extending from the South’s “noble” desire to preserve the Constitution’s guarantee of states’ rights. On the other hand, Republicans – whose power was centered in the North and among Black Americans throughout the nation – developed narratives about the war focused on emancipation and preservation of the Union.¹⁰

Historian Caroline E. Janney has tempered recent research on reconciliation between Union and Confederate veterans in the late 1800s and early 1990s, demonstrating that shows of unity were often reserved for special occasions and that more representative of the period was veterans’ continued dedication to the cause of their side.¹¹ Nevertheless, by the 1890s, Northerners and Southerners with national ambitions – mainly in politics, interstate commerce, tourism, and the arts – began to voice with unprecedented fervor what Robert J. Cook describes as a “reconciliatory strain” of the Lost Cause.¹² People with national agendas circled around a tweaked mythology that portrayed the war’s outcomes as a draw: the North preserved the Union while the South, after overthrowing the federal control of the Reconstruction era, preserved states’ rights. Reconciliation evaded the discrepancies between emancipationist and Southern histories by focusing on the valor and bravery of white Union and Confederate soldiers.¹³ It squeezed out emancipationist histories and a disproportionate number of Black voices from national discourse, while providing an intellectual underpinning for Jim Crow laws, in effect rejecting citizenship and equality as war outcomes.¹⁴

In seeking and ultimately finding broad consensus, the reconciliatory strain of the Lost Cause became so powerful that it even influenced public sculptures depicting emancipation. Kirk Savage has argued that after the Civil War many American sculptors displayed genuine interest in creating new visual vocabularies to portray emancipated African Americans, but were overpowered by the desires of citizens and patrons to emphasize white heroes through conventional visual means.¹⁵ Thus upright white men, often on horseback, were frequently juxtaposed with the kneeling slave, a century-old symbol created and wielded by white abolitionists to arouse people into action to help their Black brethren (see Figure 1). For example, Thomas Ball’s 1876 Freedmen’s Memorial depicting Abraham Lincoln liberating a kneeling Black man (Figure 2) is, on the one hand, a symbol of racial progress, and, on the other, a very limited, noncontroversial depiction of that progress. Noting the inequality represented in the hierarchical positioning of the figures, Frederick Douglass lamented that in the Freedmen’s Memorial “the act by which the negro was made a citizen of the United States and invested with the elective franchise … is nowhere seen.”¹⁶ In an era in which black equality was fiercely contested, public monuments utilized conservative visual rhetoric.

Figure 1. Detail from a broadside of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “Our Countrymen in Chains,” 1837 (Library of Congress).

Figure 2. Thomas Ball’s emancipation monument, Washington DC, 1876 (Library of Congress).

The fourteen-foot-tall bronze Stephen Foster Memorial (Figure 3), designed by Keenan with input from Morrison and created by sculptor Giuseppe Moretti, similarly depicts the white composer as upright and well-dressed, seated above a smiling enslaved man who is shoeless, wears stereotypical slave clothing, and slouches over a banjo as he performs a song that Foster transcribes as his 1848 hit “Uncle Ned.” Like the Emancipation Memorial, the Foster Memorial drew on the trope of the kneeling slave, simultaneously invoking abolitionist imagery and racial hierarchy. As Dell Upton observes, a statue must utilize “familiar images and metaphors” in order for “monuments to be legible to a broad public.”¹⁷

Figure 3. Giuseppe Moretti’s Stephen Foster memorial, 1900. (Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System).

This essay explores the historical meanings of the statue and illuminates the processes through which Foster came to be seen as a national icon by analyzing private and public writings from the monument’s conception, publicity, creation, and unveiling. As editor of the Pittsburg Press and founder of the International League of Press Clubs, Keenan was instrumental in building up the composer in the public eye.¹⁸ The Press published hundreds of articles about Foster, and many of them were reprinted and paraphrased in newspapers across the country. The paper adopted reconciliationist rhetoric, carefully avoiding aligning Foster too closely with emancipationist or Southern memory. This reveals that Morrison and Keenan, like other national figures, had a national ambition: securing cross-sectional fame for Foster. Their rhetoric, however, encouraged competing mythologies to take hold within the swirl of cultural products that surrounded the statue project.

Ultimately, the project succeeded because the statue’s promoters and creators were less interested in situating the composer within his historical context than they were in transforming him into a symbol for their present circumstances. The myths that emerged greatly shaped how people understood Foster, partly explaining why to this day his reputation is constructed primarily around six sentimental minstrel songs that represent only a sliver of his compositional output, which includes love songs, serenades, pro-Union but not anti-slavery war songs, songs about death, nature songs, and instrumental arrangements. More broadly, the myths helped center whiteness in Americans’ understandings of their history and identity.

Why Foster in the 1890s?

In 1879, Morrison helped Foster’s widow Jane begin renewing the copyrights on Stephen’s songs.¹⁹ At that time, copyright protections expired after twenty-eight years and could be renewed for an additional fourteen years, which meant that Foster’s songs began entering the public domain in 1893. In 1888 Morrison had been denied permission from the publisher Oliver Ditson & Co. to reproduce songs to which they owned the rights.²⁰ So it is no coincidence that in 1893, the year that Foster’s songs began to enter the public domain, Morrison began to write a biography of his brother that included most of his songs. He may have hoped that the book, which appeared in 1896, would bring needed income to his brother’s widow and daughter. But his interests were not purely commercial, for he also desired greater control over Foster’s memory. The little that had been written about him since his death was filled with claims that he had not written his songs and unflattering anecdotes about his alcoholism.²¹ In 1867 Morrison pleaded with the editors of one of the articles not to publish about his brother’s drinking, and he denied the authorship rumors in 1883 and 1884 in the Philadelphia Times.²² When the rumors resurfaced in the Chicago Times, Walter Welsh, the husband of Stephen’s daughter Marion, wrote to Morrison that “Marion wanted to go over and scalp the entire Times force this morning.”²³

Just as he was keenly aware of copyright issues, Morrison also knew that his brother was being mythologized in Kentucky, where fantasies about Stephen composing “My Old Kentucky Home” while visiting the state were becoming accepted as fact.²⁴ Morrison had also grown aware of the growing interest in memorializing the Civil War. With Union, Confederate, and joint war commemorations gaining in popularity, he provided an editor with biographical information about his brother that appeared in Our War Songs, North & South in 1887.²⁵ Civil War music largely paralleled veterans’ history, moving from what historian Gerald Linderman characterizes as a period of hibernation to one of revival that began in the 1880s.²⁶ As Christian McWhirter writes, “Although the songs of the Civil War never disappeared entirely, they declined enough after Appomattox that their rediscovery in the mid-1880s constituted a revival.”²⁷ At the moment he became legally free to do more with Foster’s songs as they entered the public domain, Morrison probably realized that Kentucky mythology and increased activity among veterans provided a foundation for celebrating his brother and reframing his memory.

In February of 1893, the Pennsylvania Department of the Grand Army of the Republic decided to make a bid to host the national encampment in Pittsburgh in 1894.²⁸ Morrison and Keenan quickly began collaborating on the statue project and joined the encampment planning committee.²⁹ In correspondence, Civil War journalist and author George Alfred Townsend suggested to Morrison that “a monument ought to be erected in a city like Cincinnati, the western home of music, to Stephen C. Foster – Uncle Ned with his banjo, and on the die [dais] the composer’s bust.”³⁰ To Morrison, his and his brother’s hometown of Pittsburgh made more sense than Cincinnati. The opening of Phipps Conservatory and the Carnegie Music Hall, Museums, and Library within the city’s new Schenley Park symbolized Pittsburgh’s emergence as a cultural center, and there was a perceived need for public memorials commemorating local cultural figures.³¹

On 26 March 1893, Keenan wrote to Morrison that he had “an idea in connection with this design which I think that you will approve” and expressed optimism that they could secure private funding to erect the statue “within the next year” – that is, before the encampment.³² They probably envisioned veterans singing Foster’s songs around the statue, but their plans were scuttled by the Panic of 1893, which began on May 3 and severely affected the nation’s economy into 1897. Thousands of veterans still attended the encampment, but there was no statue, and the only Foster song mentioned in coverage of the encampment was “My Old Kentucky Home.”³³

Although the statue was not completed on time, the tone of the encampment illuminates its genesis. In an earlier era, Morrison and Keenan would have been unlikely members of the planning committee. Both were prominent Democrats, and, although the GAR was officially nonpartisan, its membership skewed heavily Republican. Moreover, Morrison had written an article days before Lincoln took office advancing an economic argument for the preservation of slavery, and he sided with the Peace Democrats during the war.³⁴ By the 1890s, Morrison’s and Keenan’s politics may have appealed to the GAR, for there was an appetite for connecting with pro-reconciliation ex-Confederates to spur Southern economic development. Keenan championed such New South initiatives, making overtures to Southern news organizations as founder and president of the International League of Press Clubs. On Keenan’s initial outreach in 1893, the Atlanta Constitution commented that the League promotes “the cause of peace, enlightenment and a better understanding between nations as well as different sections of our own country.”³⁵

Keenan may have arranged for Georgia Senator John B. Gordon to give a lecture at the encampment, for Gordon’s sister-in-law, Lulie B. Gordon, was the vice president of his International League of Press Clubs.³⁶ As a Confederate commander, Gordon had provided key support to Robert E. Lee, and as a postwar politician he opposed Reconstruction and Black equality. He was also commander-in-chief of the United Confederate Veterans and Georgia’s Grand Dragon – that is, highest-ranking member – of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet he was also one of the most vocal Southern proponents of the New South and reconciliation. Prior to the encampment, Keenan published flattering articles about him, and he greeted him at the Pittsburgh train station upon his arrival.³⁷ Keenan also may have arranged for Louisville Courier Journal editor Henry Watterson, a member of the International League of Press Clubs, to give a speech encouraging the veterans to select Louisville as the site of the following year’s encampment. Hitting all the talking points of reconciliation, Watterson praised “the genius of American soldiership” and assured attendees that he spoke “in no sectional spirit” and that “the thought and hope of those who sent me, is wholly, purely, national.” He portrayed the war as a draw, claiming the nation had “weathered … dark shadows of slavery and the baleful menace of disunion, the conflict of jurisdiction between the State and the Federal power.”³⁸

In some ways, Foster was a good fit for reconciliation. His sentimental minstrel songs couched portrayals of happy slaves within portraits of Black characters that were far more humanizing than the typical minstrel songs of his day, allowing them to win broad favor. Moreover, Foster was a vehement Unionist. As a Democrat and relative through marriage of James Buchanan, he wrote the song “The White House Chair” in support of Buchanan’s 1856 presidential run. The lyrics proclaim,

Let all our hearts for union be,

For the North and South are one;

They’ve worked together manfully,

And together they will still work on.

Although the song was generally unknown in the 1890s, Morrison knew it well.³⁹ The lyrics illuminate his motivations for promoting his brother in the era of reconciliation.

But the eventual embrace of Foster by a wide swath of Americans would ultimately depend on the collective forgetting of his partisanship and portrayals of race outside of the six known sentimental minstrel songs. In the second verse of the “comic” song “Oh! Susanna,” for example, Foster portrays a Black man as incapable of understanding modern technology and makes light of a steamboat disaster that “kill’d 500 n*****.” In some of his war songs, such as “That’s What’s the Matter,” Foster antagonized secessionists. And he voiced opposition to emancipation in “A Solder in the Colored Brigade,” in which a Black soldier expresses the opinion that those who “love the darkey” had “better let him be.” Had these songs been better known in the 1890s, larger numbers of Black Americans and their allies, as well as white Southerners and their sympathizers, may have rejected Foster as a national symbol.

Introducing “Foster” to the nation

On 12 May 1895, the Press launched a campaign to raise funds from the public for the statue. The paper never publicly acknowledged Morrison’s involvement, probably to portray the campaign as a grassroots civic endeavor. Moreover, although Keenan was a Democrat, the Press was a mouthpiece for the local Republican machine, which may have resisted aligning the project too closely with Morrison. To cloud the project’s origins, Keenan announced the campaign by publishing a letter from Alfred Valentine Demetrius Watterson, a prominent Pittsburgh lawyer and cousin of Henry Watterson. This letter and Keenan’s response made it seem that Watterson independently came up with the idea and persuaded the Press to take up the cause. Keenan accepted $25 donations from Watterson and Foster’s sister-in-law Mary B. Foster. He matched their contributions and called upon Pittsburghers to contribute $10,000 by 4 July.⁴⁰

With Morrison at arm’s length, the Press exerted strong control over messaging. Its portrayal of Foster was inspired by an 1867 article by Foster acquaintance Robert Peebles Nevin. As editor of two Republican newspapers, the Pittsburgh Leader and Pittsburg Times, Nevin was not only part of the Republican machine but had given Keenan his first job in journalism. Nevin’s precise role in the statue project, if any, is unknown. But it would not have been difficult for him to supply Keenan with his article. Because Nevin did not know Stephen well, especially when he was young, he relied on Morrison’s knowledge and greatly distorted the facts. In their correspondence, Morrison informed Nevin about his brother’s youthful songs for blackface performances among friends.⁴¹ The group was neither popular nor revolutionary, yet Nevin wove an elaborate and heroic tale about the composer. In his telling, minstrelsy was invented by “W. D. Rice” – a misnomer for Thomas “Daddy” Rice – and experienced a golden age in the 1830s before devolving into vulgar depictions of Black people and losing popularity in the 1840s. Nevin writes that in 1844 Stephen formed a minstrel troupe that rescued the genre by portraying Black Americans sympathetically. He wrote that in Foster’s songs “enough of the negro dialect is retained to preserve [racial] distinction, but not to offend,” and he grandly concluded that, in Stephen’s hands, minstrelsy “dealt, in its simplicity, with universal sympathies, and taught us all to feel with the slaves the lowly joys and sorrows it celebrated.”⁴²

Nevin filled his article with statements that emphasize racial difference and white supremacy. He directed his writing toward an “us” (as in, Foster’s music “taught us to feel with the slaves”) that assumed a white readership, pitting “us” against a Black “them,” whom he described as “lowly.” He described witnessing Rice steal a Black man’s clothes so he could wear them in a blackface performance, which he referred to as “a mirthful experience.” He described Black people as possessing a “naivete,” “lolling lazily,” “childlike,” “a man-monkey,” and “a funny specimen of superior gorilla,” and he refers to one Black man as “an exquisite specimen of his sort.” From this we might infer that Nevin was a conservative Republican, perhaps opposed to the contemporaneous “radical” constitutional amendments aimed at securing Black equality. In the 1860s, this conservative Republicanism would have been welcome in the pages of the Atlantic, where Nevin published his article, but it was out of step with the Party’s national agenda.

In the era of 1890s reconciliation, though, Nevin’s Foster revisionism provided Keenan with an effective template for nonpartisan coalition-building. Two articles from early in the Press’s campaign display his direct influence. Paraphrasing Nevin, the Press asserted that Foster rescued minstrelsy from oblivion. The author must have written with Nevin’s article in hand, for the article claims that “W. D. Rice” invented minstrelsy. The next day the Press copied seven of Nevin’s paragraphs, word for word and without attribution, portraying Foster as the refiner and rescuer of minstrelsy.⁴³

Like Nevin, the Press avoided taking a direct stance on emancipation, citizenship, and equality. One strategy was to subsume race within a larger discourse of the “universalism” of Foster’s music. The Press regularly asserted that Foster’s music was known “throughout the most remote parts of the globe,” has “charmed the whole world,” and has “made him so famous in the world at large.”⁴⁴ Articles invoked travel writer Bayard Taylor’s accounts of hearing Foster’s songs “sung in far distant lands,” and reported of Pittsburghers who heard his music in Mexico, Colorado, Atlantic City, Italy, Budapest, and Germany.⁴⁵ An unnamed Chicagoan was quoted as admonishing Pittsburghers, in language conspicuously reminiscent of the Press’s rhetoric, for not having already raised a monument to the composer whose songs “have made him famous in almost every country on the globe.”⁴⁶ Similarly, an unnamed St. Louis businessman was reportedly astonished to learn that Pittsburgh had not yet built a monument to the man who expressed life “in melodies so sweet and plaintive that they have reached the depths of all hearts” (emphasis added).⁴⁷A similar strategy was to subsume Foster’s songs about race into the broader category of sentimental song, filled with universal sentiments. The Press routinely generalized that all of Foster’s music touches “the hidden springs of memory and floods the listener with those tenderest of recollections, the reminiscences of bygone days and of home.”⁴⁸

Also following Nevin, another strategy was to align Foster with sympathy for Black people. The Press’s coverage is replete with references to Foster’s sympathy toward “the lowly.” The Press claimed that Foster’s music invested “the life of even the lowliest with music,”⁴⁹ and that his “ear caught the pathos of our dusky brother singing of his lowly home among the bushes.”⁵⁰ This rhetoric goaded many people into taking the small step to claiming that Foster helped liberate enslaved people, and the Press printed their words. The paper quoted “a prominent Pittsburger” as saying that “Foster … did as much if not more toward freeing the southern negro from the bonds of slavery than Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s world-famed novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The Pittsburgher claimed that Foster’s songs “wielded their softening influences in every portion of the country, preparing the hearts of the people in a measure for the final decision of the martyred president, Abraham Lincoln.”⁵¹ The Press also publicized a lecture by Richard Skalweit, who argued that “Foster’s songs helped to temper the intense feeling of the southerners against the colored people and to enlist the sympathies of the northern people in their behalf,” and that “Foster’s pathetic melodies did more to help the cause of the colored people than the famed book Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”⁵² When reporting on a conference of the Allegheny County Teachers, the Press observed that, after singing “My Old Kentucky Home” a musician remarked that Foster’s “simple melodies were powerful in awaking sympathy in the breasts of men in behalf of the oppressed negro, and were influential in freeing him from slavery.”⁵³ Sympathy, therefore, was understood by some as aligning Foster with emancipation.

In the nineteenth century, authors often used lowly as a synonym for enslaved people, as in the full title of Stowe’s famous abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. The term lowly, however, did not carry strictly abolitionist connotations. John C. Calhoun, for example, defended enslavement before the US Senate as a “positive good,” arguing that:

never before has the black race of Central Africa … attained a condition so civilized and so improved … . It came to us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions. (emphasis added)⁵⁴

This argument became a standard defense before the Civil War and later formed a cornerstone of Lost Cause and Jim Crow propaganda. In 1859, future Lost Cause historian Edward A. Pollard wrote that “slavery does not depress the African, but elevates him … from the condition of a nomad, a heathen, a brute, to that of a civilized and comfortable creature.”⁵⁵ Writing after the war, Pollard argued that the Civil War ended slavery but “did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide State Rights.”⁵⁶ The paternalistic benevolence expressed in the term lowly, therefore, was an important component of pre- and post-war white supremacy.

Just as the Press had quoted abolitionist portrayals of Foster, the paper printed interpretations of the composer that align with white supremacy. One author argued that Foster misrepresented Black people of the South by “elevating” them. The author opined that enslaved people possessed “careless, happy, good natured soul[s]” because they lacked “hereditary racial instincts” and “educational training to develop that love of home and its environments so dear to the Anglo-Saxon heart.” The author argues that, by portraying enslaved people with these “Anglo-Saxon” characteristics, Foster’s songs failed “to portray negro character as it really existed,” but also “molded the outside world’s conception” of Blacks as well as “the negro’s idea of himself,” therefore exerting “an elevating influence on the people of which they are sung.”⁵⁷ The author appears to have supported emancipation, describing enslavement as “depressing and brutalizing,” but also displays white supremacist thinking when describing enslaved and freed people as naturally inferior to whites and embracing a paternalistic attitude toward them.

On 13 June 1897, the unsigned article “A Forgotten Genius” introduced Foster across the country, appearing in many newspapers that belonged to Keenan’s International League of Press Clubs. It described Foster in non-sectional terms, claiming that his music had “enlivened the marches of the northern and southern soldiers alike during the war,” and that “Foster was born and bred in Pittsburg, but his ancestors were southern, and the stories of plantation life that were told him in his childhood were treasured and given again to the world, with music that will never die.”⁵⁸ The rhetoric would not have discouraged readers who believed that Foster had played a role in the movements for emancipation and equality, but it also encouraged some readers to imagine him as a supporter of slavery. One week after it began appearing in the nation’s newspapers, a correspondent for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat summarized the article but added that the composer:

seems to have had a presentiment that the days of slavery were numbered, and although a Northerner by birth regretted in his song the coming of the day when the darkies would “sing no more by the glimmer of the moon, on the bench by the old cabin door.”⁵⁹

Foster’s sympathy toward the “lowly,” then, was not necessarily linked to abolitionism, equality, or white supremacy, but it did not deny these connections either. In the era of reconciliation, Foster’s sympathy correlated to veterans’ valor and bravery. It avoided directly situating Foster within Southern or emancipationist histories while enabling both readings. Foster could be seen as sympathetic to slaves or the institution of slavery.

Creating and unveiling the statue

In late 1896, Morrison and Keenan contacted sculptor Charles H. Niehaus about creating a plaster model as a proposal to be considered for the Foster statue (Figures 4 and 5).⁶⁰ Niehaus envisioned a seated Foster, with head slightly bowed, legs crossed, and book lowered at his side, as if pondering the meaning of its words. The model portrays Foster as a studious deep thinker who found inspiration in literature. Due to the Spanish-American War, it was not until 1899 that Keenan formed a committee to consider the proposal, and it appears that its rejection was preordained. As reported in the Commercial Gazette, the committee was to consider it alongside a proposal by Giuseppe Moretti, and the design was to correspond to “an idea of Chairman T. J. Keenan.” Keenan’s idea turned out to be a modified version of Townsend’s suggestion to Morrison back in 1893, for he envisioned “the composer … placed in a sitting position upon a rock in an attitude of attention to an air seemingly played by an old negro sitting at his feet. In the hands of the negro is a banjo.”⁶¹ Niehaus’s design did not conform to Keenan’s vision, so it appears the committee already leaned toward Moretti.

Figure 4. Charles H. Niehaus’s plaster model for a statue of Stephen C. Foster, ca. 1896. (Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System).

Figure 5. Marie Niehaus’s bronze sculpture of Stephen C. Foster, based on her father’s model. (Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System).

Committee member Edward M. Bigelow, the city’s Director of Public Works, probably further swayed his colleagues, for he had become what Moretti’s assistant Geneva Mercer described as “lifelong friends” with the sculptor.⁶² But it was not just Keenan and Bigelow who steered the committee toward Moretti. Mercer’s description of the statue hints that the creators wanted the monument to seem as if it belonged in the verdant setting in Highland Park. She notes that the composition conveyed “a pleasing grace” in its depiction of “the composer seated easily and informally on a boulder, or bank” while “at his feet sits Old Black Joe playing a banjo.” She added, “One passes it in the park … with the feeling that here is a memorial that is truly a part of its environment.”⁶³ To the creators, it seems, the playful ease of the scene and the natural setting made it fitting for Pittsburgh’s less central park. Furthermore, since the song “Uncle Ned” was better known than Foster, Keenan’s design made it more obvious to turn-of-the-century viewers who Stephen Foster was. In fact, while the base of the statue gives the composer’s name and dates, the page on which Foster transcribes the enslaved man’s music droops down to reveal that Foster has titled the song “Uncle Ned.” The title is written upside down on the page so that it becomes more a front-and-center label for viewers than a realistic depiction of transcription (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Detail of Moretti’s Foster statue showing “Uncle Ned” written upside-down.

Kirk Savage observes that the statue portrays a “strange collapsing of worlds.” The two figures “straddled times and places,” representing the “disparate worlds [of] the Southern plantation and the Northern city.” He adds, “If there was a genius to this monument, it was in the very difficulty that viewers always had locating themselves in time and space when standing before it.”⁶⁴ The statue, in other words, represented how many turn-of-the-century Americans in the North and South were beginning to view their nation: as a union of sections and states representing vast cultural, economic, political, and racial diversity. Keenan’s design portrays the white, urbane Foster as sympathetically transcribing the music of a “lowly” rural Black man. The slave caricature doubled as a symbol of the South, allowing the group to depict the reconciliation of the North (Foster) and the South (the caricature). It was a progressive portrayal of black Americans in that it allowed the Black man to symbolize the South, and it was inclusive of Lost Cause proponents in that the man’s smiling face nodded toward the myth of the happy slave. The positioning of the figures with the Black man below Foster also subtly suggests the resurgence of white supremacy at the dawn of the Jim Crow era. The pervasive description of the Black man as “at his [Foster’s] feet” suggests that the statue’s hierarchy was not something the creators wanted to go unnoticed.⁶⁵

Viewers of the statue who knew the song “Uncle Ned” would not be dissuaded from viewing the statue however they pleased. The ballad, voicing the imagined perspective of enslaved people mourning the absence of “old Uncle Ned,” is open-ended:

Dere was an old N*****, dey call’d him Uncle Ned

He’s dead long ago, long ago!

He had no wool on de top ob his head

De place whar de wool ought to grow.

Den lay down de subble and de hoe.

Hang up de fiddle and de bow:

No more hard work for poor old Ned

He’s gone whar de good N*****s go.

The melody longingly reaches up to its highest point on “poor Old Ned,” the last note of which, the notation implies, is to be taken out of time and sustained for dramatic effect. To further dramatize the text, these lines and music are emphatically repeated. In comparison to other well-known songs and musical genres of the time, “Uncle Ned” could be heard as profoundly humanizing. Other minstrel songs by Foster and his contemporaries dehumanized Black people by ridiculing their intellect and emotional capacities. And in the 1890s, the stereotypes of minstrelsy experienced a resurgence in the popular genre known as the “coon” song. In contrast, “Uncle Ned” could be heard as a sympathetic portrait of enslaved African Americans expressing the rawest of human emotions. And yet, like Foster’s other sentimental minstrel songs, the target of the emotions is unclear. Is the song a humanizing, progressive portrayal of African Americans? Is it a lament for the death of slavery and the Old South? Or is it neutral?

Niehaus’s model, of course, enables none of these readings. It would not have blended with its natural surroundings in the same ways, and its visual language did not represent racial and sectional inclusivity like Moretti’s statue. Such a design would not have been unusual for a historical figure whose national reputation was already established. For example, viewers of Niehaus’s 1909 statue of Lincoln (Figure 7) in Kenosha, Wisconsin encounter a seated Lincoln, deep in thought. With even the smallest knowledge of the president, they might imagine him contemplating war strategy or the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation. But for the more obscure Foster, this pose would not have helped viewers understand who he was, or why he was worthy of a statue. Unlike Moretti’s statue, Niehaus’s proposal did not invoke a well-known Foster song, and it did not lean into the ambiguities of Foster’s sentimental songs that made them ripe for 1890s reconciliation. Niehaus’s model simply glorifies Foster by showing him alone, pondering literature. The committee rejected it.

Figure 7. Charles Niehaus, Statue of Abraham Lincoln Kenosha, Wisconsin, 1909 (Photograph by Kenneth C. Zirkel. Wikimedia Commons).

The unveiling ceremony on 12 September 1900, was non-sectional, interracial, and bipartisan. But the racial hierarchy the statue suggested was also embedded in the structure of the project and its processes of memory-keeping. Less than two weeks prior to the unveiling, E. D. W. Jones, an African Methodist Episcopal minister, wrote to Keenan to ask if Black children could be included in the ceremony. He wrote,

Foster wrote many of his songs in the peculiar negro dialect and the sympathy and love running through his melodies served in molding a healthy public sentiment in behalf of a black man’s right and liberties. Feeling that the colored people should take some part in the dedication of the Foster memorial I would suggest that the Sunday school scholars of all negro churches in this vicinity attend the exercises and I can assure you that they will be proud to assist in paying honor to so great a man.⁶⁶

Keenan responded that planning was too far along to include Black Sunday School choirs, but he invited Black people to attend the event, assuring them that:

at the unveiling of the memorial to the great composer who sang the melodies of the negro race as they were never sung before, the colored citizens will be given every consideration and treated upon perfect equality with all others who attend.

Jones’s motivations for writing the letter are unknown. He may have genuinely appreciated the statue, or he may have wanted to embrace an opportunity for Black representation at a civic event, perhaps in contrast to the white supremacy suggested in Foster’s songs and the rhetoric of many of his admirers. Keenan’s publication of the letter and his response reveals that he wanted the statue, the event, and his paper to reflect racial inclusivity. At the same time, his response also exposes the degree of power wielded by white memory-keepers. His reply to Jones was the first and only example of outreach to Black residents of the city. Black people were not unwelcome, per se, but to participate they had to abide by the parameters established by the white organizers, who alone chose the “hero” to be celebrated, controlled public discussion, and planned the ceremony. More than anyone else, Keenan had invented through the implications of the Press’s rhetoric the connection between Foster and the “black man’s rights and liberties,” and then, when this rhetoric was echoed by a Black man requesting black involvement in the project, he denied the request and published the man’s words as evidence of Foster’s supposed interracial “sympathy and love.”

At the ceremony, prominent Republicans sat alongside Morrison in front of large crowds, and at one point the niece shared between Stephen and former Democratic president James Buchanan laid a wreath at the statue’s base. Two of the speakers subsumed issues of race, partisanship, and sectional divisions into broader rhetoric about the universality of Foster’s music. In his hyperbolic style, Keenan said that,

The music of Old Folks at Home has found an interpreter in every instrument, and in almost every language known to man. The boatman of the Nile measures his strokes to its cadence, and the Patagonian mother lulls her infant to sleep with snatches of the air borne from the deck of some passing vessel to her wave-tossed canoe. In the twilight of the tropics and the stillness of the long Arctic night it has brought to the wanderer from the banks of the Monongahela sweet memories of home.

George W. Wilson of the Department of Public Works, who accepted the statue on behalf of the city, stated that “from every corner of [the world] comes daily the echo of [Foster’s] exquisitely melodious songs.”⁶⁷

The only speaker who directly addressed race, James Francis Burke, read the “dedication poem” that had been commissioned from reconciliationist poet, Republican, and Union Army veteran George M. Vickers. The poem portrays Foster as sympathetic to the “lowly”:

Friend of the lowly slave was he,

Sharing their weight of misery,

Singing their loves, their hopes, their fears,

Staying with song their rising tears;

Tender his voice of minstrelsy

Flowing from heart of melody.⁶⁸

With these words, Vickers deployed the evasive rhetorical strategies he had honed in the book Under Both Flags: A Panorama of the Great Civil War as Represented in Story, Anecdote, Adventure, and the Romance of Reality. In the introduction, he wrote that “the proudest tribute we can pay to the memory of the brave men of both armies is, they were Americans.”⁶⁹ To Vickers, soldiers were brave, Foster was sympathetic, and the nation was reconciled.

The ceremony drove this point home with the performance of Victor Herbert’s American Fantasy. Herbert, the conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, directed a band composed of thousands of local musicians in a medley that offered a sonic chronology of the nation’s history. Beginning with the Federal-era “Hail Columbia,” it moved into Foster’s antebellum “Old Folks at Home” before proceeding to military marches and the unofficial Confederate anthem, “Dixie.” The finale emphasized reconciliation through its grand presentation of the tune that would soon become the national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Conclusion

Prior to the unveiling, the Press published an anonymous letter that celebrated how the project secured “the fame of the composer” by educating the public about “who the author of these songs was.”⁷⁰ Morrison and Keenan had indeed achieved their goal of increasing awareness of Foster. But their methods of promotion left people with vastly different ideas about him. For some, Foster’s sympathy for the lowly strengthened their perception of the composer as playing a part in emancipation. For others, it portrayed him as a Confederate sympathizer. Starting in the 1890s, Foster’s music would be increasingly included in songbooks of both the GAR and the Lost Cause propaganda of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.⁷¹

Most Americans, though, probably took a broad look at the statue project, observing a composer celebrated by Northerners and Southerners, Republicans and Democrats, urban and country folk, rich and poor, and white and Black. From this perspective, Foster was not an icon of any political faction, region, class, or race, but an icon of America in all its diversity, a symbol of a pluralistic and integrated nation, an embodiment of the American melting pot. In 1895, Czech composer Antonín Dvořák wrote that the songs that “belong to the American and appeal more strongly to him than any others” are “the co-called plantation melodies and slave songs, … like those of Foster.”⁷² Dvořák, Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and many others began arranging and quoting Foster’s melodies to invoke a sense of Americanness in their own compositions. In 1906, readers of the National Magazine voted for more of his songs than those of any other composer to be included in Heart Songs Dear to the American People.⁷³ To these Americans, Foster’s melodies were sonic embodiments of the nation.

Within this context of elevating Foster to a national icon, some Black Americans came to see the composer as occupying a special place in their historical memory. W. E. B. DuBois, for example, wrote in The Souls of Black Folk that Foster’s songs represented an important stage in the development of African American music, and that “the songs of white America have been distinctively influenced by the slave songs.”⁷⁴ Taking up the topic again a decade later, DuBois portrayed Foster as an important link between the spirituals of enslaved people and the compositions of later Black composers: “In our day Negro artists like Johnson and Will Marian [sic] Cook have taken up this [Foster’s] music and begun a newer and most important development, using the syncopated measure popularly known as ‘rag time.’”⁷⁵ Such views were prominent strains of Black thought well into the twentieth century.

These views were sincere and impactful, to be sure, but they were built upon the work of white memory-keepers who framed Foster’s memory around only six of his songs and deployed reconciliationist rhetoric that highlighted his sympathy and ignored his opposition to abolition and secession. These memory-keeping processes were self-fulfilling prophecies, transforming Foster into the American icon they purported that he had always been. Foster became seen as the trunk of the tree from which all branches of American music grew. On 15 October 1951, for example, as the US government deliberated about the creation of Stephen Foster Day, the House Judiciary Committee recognized Foster as “the father of American folk music” and “a national expression of democracy through his clear and simple embodiment of American tradition.”⁷⁶ President Truman quickly designated January 13 as Stephen Foster Day, which has been on the federal calendar since 1952.⁷⁷

It is no coincidence that these historical memories, which preserved whiteness’s centrality in notions of American history and identity, were connected to the rise and fall of Jim Crow. The statue stood in Highland Park until 1944, when the city moved it to a more populated setting. As white control of public space and memory was challenged in the era of desegregation, objections to the statue surfaced in public discourse. After decades of debate, in 2018 the Pittsburgh Arts Commission decided to remove it from public display. At the time of this writing, it sits in three pieces. The bronze figures are stored in a wooden box adjacent to the base and the pedestal, tucked away in a fenced-in area behind a dog park (Figure 8). In 1900, the statue represented Foster’s emergence as a national symbol, remembering him in terms that many people considered inclusive. Today, in its current state, it represents how the constructedness of those memories and notions of nationhood have been contested.

Figure 8. The Foster Statue in 2024.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Lynch

Christopher Lynch, PhD, introduces students and researchers to the Foster Hall Collection – the principal repository for research on Stephen Foster – in his role as Project Coordinator at the Center for American Music in the University of Pittsburgh Library System. He is also an Artist Lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University.

Notes

1 Songwriters Hall of Fame, https://www.songhall.org/profile/Stephen_Foster, accessed April 13, 2022.

2 Bingham, My Old Kentucky Home, 37.

3 Bailey, “Opera, Lieder, or Stephen Foster?”, 39.

4 Ibid., 53.

5 For royalty statements, see Foster Hall Collection (FHC), Center for American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System. See also Howard, Stephen Foster, 353–7. For late-nineteenth-century performances, see Bingham, 42–64; Austin, “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “The Old Folks at Home.”

6 Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 57.

7 Douglass, “The Anti-Slavery Movement,” 462.

8 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 5.

9 Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 53–72; Brooke, There Is A North, 170–210. See also Bingham, My Old Kentucky Home, 29–32.

10 See Blight, Race and Reunion 31–97; and Cook, Civil War Memories, 71–161.

11 Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 9.

12 Cook, Civil War Memories, 71.

13 Blight, Race and Reunion, 88–91.

14 Blight, Race and Reunion.

15 Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 52–128.

16 Frederick Douglass, “A Suggestion,” National Republican, qtd. in White and Sandage, “What Frederick Douglass Had to Say.”

17 Upton, What Can and Can’t Be Said.

18 Prominent Men of Pittsburgh, 8.

19 See Howard, Stephen Foster, 353–7.

20 Oliver Ditson & Co. to Morrison Foster, May 5, 1888, FHC.

21 For authorship claims, see “Old Folks at Home,” Pittsburg Leader, February 23, 1879; “Making Sweet Songs,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, January 31, 1886; and “Thoughts on Matters Lyric and Dramatic,” Belford’s Monthly and Democratic Review, vol. 1, no. 3 (November 1891): 348–9. See also, General H. Welshous to Morrison Foster, November 23, 1891, FHC. For alcoholism anecdotes, see George W. Birdseye, “A Reminiscence of the late Stephen C. Foster,” New York Musical Gazette, January 1, 1867; Robert P. Nevin, “Stephen Foster and Negro Minstrelsy,” Atlantic, November 1867; and John Mahon, “The Last Years of Stephen C. Foster,” New York Clipper, March 24, 1877.

22 Mason Bros. to Morrison Foster, February 2, 1867, FHC. “A Writer of Songs,” Philadelphia Times, April 15, 1883; “Stephen C. Foster’s Songs,” Philadelphia Times, July 24, 1884.

23 Walter Welsh to Morrison Foster, April 7, 1890, FHC.

24 Will S. Hays speculated that Foster wrote the song while visiting John Rowan’s estate in Bardstown, Kentucky. Will S. Hays, “Melody His Monument,” Louisville Courier-Journal, June 18, 1893. As the myth spread, it became the cornerstone of Kentucky’s tourism industry. See Bingham, My Old Kentucky Home. John Tasker Howard debunked the Kentucky myths. See Howard, Stephen Foster, 170–7.

25 Karl Merz to Morrison Foster, July 20, 1869, FHC; S. Brainard & Sons to Morrison Foster, July 21, 1869; Karl Merz to Morrison Foster, December 30, 1877, FHC; and Karl Merz to Morrison Foster, January 10, 1878. Our War Songs, North & South (Cleveland: S. Brainards’ Sons, 1887).

26 Linderman, Embattled Courage, 266–97.

27 McWhirter, Battle Hymns, 186.

28 “Grand Army of the Republic,” Pittsburg Press, February 19, 1893.

29 “Men at the Helm,” Pittsburg Press, September 9, 1894; “Calling for Cash,” Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, April 21, 1894.

30 George Alfred Townsend to Morrison Foster, undated, FHC.

31 See Muller and Tarr, Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern; Judd, “Edward M. Bigelow”; and Staresinic, “Giuseppe Moretti’s East End Bronzes.”

32 T. J. Keenan to Morrison Foster, March 26, 1893, FHC.

33 “Taking the Town,” Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, September 10, 1894.

34 Morrison Foster, “The Uses of the Slave States,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 28, 1861. See Lynch, “Stephen Foster and the Slavery Question,” 19–22; and O’Connell, Life & Songs of Stephen C. Foster, 251–5.

35 “Our Great Editors,” Atlanta Constitution, December 24, 1893.

36 “Society,” Pittsburg Press, September 10, 1894.

37 “Gen. Gordon’s Coming,” Pittsburg Press, September 2, 1894; “A Southern Hero,” Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, September 10, 1894.

38 Watterson qtd. in Journal of the Twenty-Eighth National Encampment, 13.

39 The song was unpublished in Foster’s lifetime. Morrison published it in the Pittsburgh Dispatch on September 20, 1885. See Saunders and Root, The Music of Stephen C. Foster, vol. 2, 417–18.

40 “Stephen C. Foster,” Pittsburg Press, May 12, 1895. For more on A. V. D. Watterson, see Laughlin, Joseph Ledlie and William Moody, 68; and The Book of Prominent Pennsylvanians, 48.

41 Nevin to Morrison Foster, March 29, 1866, FHC.

42 Nevin, “Stephen C. Foster and Negro Minstrelsy,” 614 and 616.

43 “Minstrelsy Owes Much to the Gifted Composer,” Pittsburg Press, May 22, 1895; “Composer’s Connection with Political Campaigns,” Pittsburg Press, May 23, 1895.

44 “The Public Mind Taking Firm Hold of the Project,” Pittsburg Press, May 20, 1895; “The Great Song Writer Popular from the Start,” Pittsburg Press, July 29, 1895; and “Interest Growing,” Pittsburg Post, May 17, 1895.

45 For Bayard Taylor, see “Stephen C. Foster Memorial,” Pittsburg Press, May 12, 1895; and “Motive that Prompted the Press to Advocate and Support the Movement,” Pittsburg Press, June 24, 1895. For Mexico and Colorado, see “A Pittsburger’s Account of His Visit to Mexico,” Pittsburg Press, July 6, 1895. For Atlantic City, see “Pittsburg Composer’s Melodies All the Rage,” Pittsburg Press, July 7, 1895. For Italy, see “Wide Popularity of Our Composer’s Music,” Pittsburg Press, June 30, 1895. For Budapest, see “Foster’s Melodies,” Pittsburg Press, August 27, 1896. For Germany, see “Suwannee River Heard by a Pittsburger in Europe,” Pittsburg Press, September 13, 1895.

46 “A. Carnegie, $1,000,” Pittsburg Press, June 10, 1895.

47 “A Few Comments Made by a St. Louis Business Man,” Pittsburg Press, August 9, 1895.

48 “Stephen C. Foster Memorial,” Pittsburg Press, May 12, 1895.

49 “Stephen C. Foster Memorial,” Pittsburg Press, May 12, 1895.

50 “Expression from a Member of the Woman’s Exchange,” Pittsburg Press, May 17, 1895. The phrase “lowly home among the bushes” comes from Foster’s song “Old Folks at Home.”

51 “The Composer Did Much Toward Freeing the Negro,” Pittsburg Press, June 1895[?].

52 “The Souvenir Medal No. 1 Still Awaiting Bidders,” Pittsburg Press, Sept. 26, 1895.

53 “Some Foster Melodies Sung at the Institute,” Pittsburg Press, August 29, 1900.

54 John C. Calhoun, “Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate, February 6th, 1837,” in Richard R. Cralle, ed., Speeches of John C. Calhoun, Delivered in the House of Representatives and in the Senate of the United States (New D. Appleton, 1853).

55 Pollard, Black Diamonds, 81.

56 Pollard qtd. in Cox, No Common Ground, 17.

57 “An Interview with the Song Writer’s Only Daughter,” Pittsburg Press, July 2, 1895.

58 On June 13, 1897, “A Forgotten Genius” appeared in New Orleans Times-Picayune, Butte Miner, Buffalo Times, and Evansville Courier. June 16: Osh Kosh Daily Northwestern, and Marshall Evening Messenger. June 18: Wilkes-Barre News. June 20: Shreveport Journal. June 28: De Kalb Daily Chronicle. July 1: Wood County Reporter, Portage Daily Democrat, Argyle Atlas, and Mineral Point Weekly Tribune. July 2: Postville Review. July 8: Fort Wayne Weekly Journal.

59 “My Old Kentucky Home,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 20, 1897.

60 Charles H. Niehaus to Morrison Foster, December 5, 1896, FHC.

61 “Tribute to Foster,” Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, May 10, 1899.

62 Geneva Mercer, “Biographical Dates of Giuseppe Moretti, Sculptor,” March 1927, Giuseppe Moretti Papers, Birmingham Public Library, Alabama, 617.1.1. For Moretti’s other sculptures in Pittsburgh, see Gay and Evert, Discovering Pittsburgh’s Sculpture. For more on Moretti, see Miriam Rogers Fowler, “Giuseppe Moretti: Master Sculptor and Father of Vulcan.”

63 Geneva Mercer, “Biographical Dates of Giuseppe Moretti.”

64 Savage, “No Time, No Place,” 147.

65 “Tribute to Foster,” Pittsburgh Commerical Gazette, May 10, 1899; “Press League Literary Contest No. 3,” Pittsburg Press, October 29, 1899; “The Stephen C. Foster Monument,” Pittsburg Press, August 4, 1900; “Story of the Stephen C. Foster Memorial,” Pittsburg Press August 5, 1900; “How the Portrait of Foster Was Obtained,” Pittsburg Press, August 23, 1900; “Pittsburg’s Tribute to the Poet of the World,” Pittsburg Press, September 12, 1900; “Foster Memorial,” Commercial Gazette, September 13, 1900.

66 “Colored People’s Love for Foster Melodies,” Pittsburg Press, August 20, 1900.

67 “Foster Memorial Unveiling Exercises,” Pittsburg Press, September 13, 1900.

68 “Song Composer Fitly Honored,” Pittsburgh Post, September 13, 1900.

69 Vickers, Under Both Flags, np.

70 “Real Effect of the S. C. Foster Memorial,” Pittsburg Press, August 15, 1900.

71 McWhirter, Battle Hymns, 205.

72 Antonín Dvořák, “Music in America,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1895, 429–34.

73 Chapple, Heart Songs Dear to the American People.

74 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 256.

75 Du Bois, “The Negro in Literature and Art,” 233–4.

76 House of Representatives, 82nd Congress, Report No. 1185, “Stephen Foster Memorial Day,” October 15, 1951.

77 President Harry S. Truman, Proclamation 2957, Stephen Foster Memorial Day, in Code of Federal Regulations, Title 3—The President, 1949–1953 Compilation, 143.