Spiritual Currents and Manifest Destiny in the Art of Hiram Powers - Critical Essay

As the Civil War drew to a close in the early months of 1865, however, Powers came to see America in an entirely different light. The manacles could now be identified precisely with principles previously denied; hence, in again urging Congress to place his statue at its destined site, Powers promoted an

America with broken chains of slavery under foot, the union unbroken and crowned with victory and herself thanking God for all. It may turn out in the end that the rejection of this statue by President Pierce, and Buchanan was providential. The time for it had not come. It represents our country with her foot on slavery, broken and destroyed forever. It is quite true that I did not comprehend our slave system purposely in the design. The broken chains referred to the way in which we got our national liberty. But the statue itself fully comprehends both. I claim no merit by fore-knowledge, for its present signification. [62]

As an instrument of divine will, Powers occasionally received personal intimations about the purposes he was serving, as was the case with the Greek Slave, but America addressed the fate of the union, and he was obliged to await the unfolding of national events before its implications were fully realized. Similar reasoning appears in a conversation recorded by Nathaniel Hawthorne about the possibility of flying as a future mode of transportation; Powers told his listener that the prospect would eventuate only when "the moral condition of mankind is so improved as to obviate the bad uses to which the power might be applied." [63] According to this idealistic reading of history, the demise of slavery represented just such a step forward in humanity's "moral condition," an advance, Powers hoped, that would now alert his fellow countrymen to the true value of his statue and induce them to purchase it. If the intentions of the individual corresponded to celestial ideals, matters of state were no less encompassed b y the same principle. [64]

Powers addressed the latter tenet in his California (Figs. 1, 7), a personification of the state in the form of a Native American. Here, the legibility of the symbolic content varies; it is most obvious in the descending divining rod and thorns clasped behind the maiden's back, objects devised to signal the rewards and perils that await the forty-niners; less apparent are the moral implications that reside in the figure's physical constitution. [63] What follows is an examination of Powers's urge to have California placed at Sutter's run and the predilections this act was intended to answer; these include childhood memories, folk customs, imponderable fluids, consecrated places, phrenology, spiritualism, and Swedenborgianism. It is the confluence of these currents that make the statue an especially comprehensive exposition of the diverse beliefs associated with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the closely related concept of American exceptionalism, which identified the United States as a land free of the iniquity and corruption of the Old World.