Thomas Moore's "The Lake of the Dismal Swamp"

Nothing in Moore's introduction or in the poem itself demands that the "maid" is an Indian. However, it might be said that Moore suggests as much since the maid "paddles her white canoe," while her beloved, in order to search for her, hollows "a boat of the birchen bark."[1] Whatever Moore's intent regarding the ethnic identity of the two--assuming he had an intent--a distinction between them certainly is part of the poem's reception in America. Evidence for this derives from, of all things, an Indian phantom.

In a monograph titled Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America, historian Molly McGarry reports that in 1853, Powhatan, the great Algonquian leader of tidewater Virginia during the early seventeenth century, spoke through "a thirteen-year-old medium in Lebanon, New Hampshire."[2] McGarry notes that Spiritualists would sometimes conjure the apparition of a famous historical figure. As one would expect, the expertise or unique experience of that person served as the basis for his or her message to people of the present. When the spectral figure was an American Indian, the message was often "much more ambiguous and, indeed, haunting."[3] In such cases, the apparition typically would cast blame on whites for the disappearance of Indians. Sometimes these indictments were followed by notes of resignation and reports of the happiness of Indians in the afterlife.[4] When in 1853 Powhatan spoke through the teenager in New Hampshire, he not only seemed familiar with Moore's poem, but also designated the ethnicity of the maid:

There are but few left to lament the departure of a once powerful race, none to sit by the council fire, to seek friendship or to plot revenge. No daring footsteps now climb the hills and precipices of our native land. And where is now the Indian maiden, who roamed through the glens and valleys, or skimmed o'er the lake in her swift canoe?[5]

In all likelihood, then, Meta Chestnutt did not imagine, but rather received this part of her interpretation of "The Lake of the Dismal Swamp."

Notes

[1] "A Ballad. The Lake of the Dismal Swamp," appears in Thomas Moore, Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (Philadelphia: John Watts, 1806), 33-35.

[2] Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 66.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 69.

[5] "An Indian Spirit's Speech," Spiritual Telegraph 1 (1853): 20-21, as quoted in McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past, 68. See notes 1 and 7 on 197-98.