Moses Williams: The Enslaved Artist Who Bought His Freedom

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannon. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans Slavery is one of the darkest chapters in American history, yet it's impossible to study the progression of the United States without looking at this element of our history. While it wasn't until the Civil War that slavery was ended throughout the United States, many slave owners were compelled to free their slaves in the late 18th century. While we don't hear about this as often, it's important to acknowledge how slavery was treated differently in the North versus the South, which is the more familiar area. In the Northern states, the role which freed Black people had was complex and very interesting. While they lacked many of the privileges of their white neighbors, there were many very talented and successful Black people who forged interesting and memorable lives for themselves in this complex culture. Today, we're going to talk about a Black artist who was born into slavery in the household of a famous artist and was able to buy his own freedom through his talent. The first family of art in the United States is the Peale family. Started by patriarch Charles Wilson Peale, a renowned portraitist in colonial America, this family included his siblings, numerous children, nieces and nephews, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. The artistic influence of this family was so great that it also included one of the slaves who was in their household. This artist was known as Moses Williams. Because he was born a slave, some of the details of his life are a little confusing, most notably his dates. It's debatable exactly what year he was born. The most common year stated is 1777, but some of the later dates in his life indicate that he may in fact have been born in 1775. His parents were Scarborough and Lucy. Charles Wilson Peale acquired them from a Maryland slave owner, a plantation owner, who basically gave them to Mr. Peale as payment for a portrait which was done of him. This may not have been the only time that Peale received slaves as payment for portraits, but these are the only people as this couple, or the only slaves about whom we really know, who belonged to Mr. Peale. Again, he was a northerner and slavery wasn't as common in Pennsylvania where he lived at this point. The exact date when Peale acquired Scarborough and Lucy is not known for sure, but it was sometime between 1769 and 1775. Now also, because of the dates when Moses, their one son, may have been born, it also isn't entirely certain whether he was born in Maryland or whether he was born after his parents lived in the Peale household. As a young boy, Moses was named Moses Peale as his parents had the last name of their owner, but after Scarborough achieved his freedom, he changed not only his last name but gave himself a new first name as well, changing his name to John Williams. Eventually, after Moses acquired his own freedom, he would also change his surname to match that of his father, becoming Moses Williams, the name by which he's known today. Now, it might seem strange to be talking about these people acquiring their freedom when we were talking about the 1770s, but it's important to look at the issue of slavery in the state of Pennsylvania. In 1780, Pennsylvania passed the law that was called the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery. It's involved with the state legislature and thus helped with the crafting of this law, and this is after the revolution but before the official beginning of the United States with George Washington as president. This law was one of the attempts of the North to gradually phase out slavery, and this is important to acknowledge. Before even the first president had been in office, people in the North knew that slavery was against the principles of this new nation they were trying to found, but the whole point was to try to get people together, and many industries, particularly the plantations, were very reliant on slave labor. But it was much easier for the people in the North to part with slavery, so in Pennsylvania, this act passed, and the way it worked was that when slaves would turn 28, or if they already were over that age, they would be freed, but anyone under that age would continue working as a slave until the age of 28, at which point he or she would receive his manumission. Now, because of this, in 1786, both of Moses's parents turned 28 and were manumitted, but Moses was only 9 or 11, depending on what year he was born, so he still technically belonged to the Peale family and continued to work as a slave. It's not clear there were any other slaves in the Peale household at this point. Most likely there weren't, because if Peale had acquired any other slaves as payment for his paintings, they probably had all been manumitted in the six years since the act passed by this point, and the other reference to servants, they all seem to have been white servants. And again, the Peales didn't have a plantation, so they didn't need a lot of manual labor. The business that Peale had was running a museum. Moses was considered the 18th child in the Peale family, because Charles Wilson Peale had 17 children between his first two wives. Moses was around the age of Peale's oldest couple of children, a little bit older than his son Rembrandt, who would go on to become a famous portraitist, and definitely at least one year, if not more, younger than his oldest daughter. So as a young boy, although he was black, he was raised alongside the Peale children more like a brother than as a slave, because he was taught to do the same things as the other Peale children, namely taxidermy, animal husbandry, the labeling of exhibits in the museum, organization, and basically museum curation. He wasn't taught the art of painting, but he did learn an artistic skill. In the early 1800s, a new artistic machine had been developed, and Peale himself helped sort of design this particular version of it and popularize it. It was called the physiognatrace. It was a machine which would be used to draw the outline of a silhouette. This is considered a predecessor to photography, which would be developed about 30 years later, because it was a more accurate way of capturing people's features, since it actually was an outline created by a machine rather than a more artistic rendering of someone's likeness, such as a portrait would be. Using this physiognatrace required a particular skill, and Peale taught this to his children, including Raphael in particular. He named all his children after famous artists, but he also taught it to Moses, and Moses proved to be so good at it that he was better than Raphael, Rembrandt, and Peale himself. He was the best one at doing it, so that became his job. Now, it was around the year 1802 that he really mastered this skill, at which point records indicate he was 27, which is why I lean more toward thinking he was born in 1775, because the dates don't quite line up if he were born in 1777. This physiognatrace was set up as sort of a booth in the museum, an attraction, because, mind you, at this point museums weren't funded by the government. They didn't have grants, they didn't have non-profit status, they didn't have a bunch of donors. They were more like carnivals. They were a form of entertainment, so Peale and his sons were masters of finding ways to make them very entertaining. There was a bit of a sideshow aspect to it. They would have mummies and special exhibits, a lot more than just dull lectures. It was very performative, and Moses was a big part of that. He would oftentimes dress up as an Indian or a Hawaiian chief to display their mastodon skeleton or hand out playbills. There was a bit of the exotic element to it, but having one's silhouette rendered was a very popular attraction at the museum. In fact, in those first few years that it was in the museum, at least 80 percent of visitors had a silhouette made. It was eight cents to have your silhouette made. It could be less if you did it yourself, you still had to pay for the paper, but the eight cents fee was for the person operating the machine, which was usually Moses. Peale let him keep all the money he made from it, and it turned out to be so popular that within a year he'd acquired enough money that he was able to buy his freedom a year early at the age of 27 in 1802, which is again why I think he was born in 1775. It's interesting to see a letter which talks about this, which was written by Rembrandt. Rembrandt later recalled that Moses took a fancy to amuse himself in cutting out the rejected profiles made by the machine, and soon acquired such dexterity and accuracy that the machine was confided to his custody with the privilege of retaining the fee for drawing and cutting. This soon became so profitable that my father insisted upon giving him his freedom one year in advance. Now, it's interesting to note that Rembrandt said that he gave him his freedom, although he acknowledged that it was because it was so profitable. Whereas most other sources say that he bought his freedom, perhaps Rembrandt meant he agreed to accept his freedom in exchange for payment. I'm not sure. But some of what Rembrandt said in that letter must be taken with a grain of salt, because he said that Moses was entirely useless until the age of 27, at which point he learned how to use the physiognomy trace, which seems pretty unfair considering that he had learned animal husbandry, taxidermy, and had been working at the museum basically his whole life. So I think that Rembrandt resented how much Moses was considered one of the brothers, and he was a couple of years older than Rembrandt, so he seems to have been more bigoted toward Moses than his father was. Because it's interesting to note how Charles referred to Moses in many of his letters. For instance, he recounted one incident where a visitor to the museum from the south was a little unsure about the fact that this obviously black young man was going to do his silhouette. But Charles seemed to have been somewhat amused by that, and he said that he assured him that Moses was better at operating the machine than he himself was. In later letters, Charles would refer to Moses's family and when his children were born in the same sentence as to when his own grandchildren were born, there are two likenesses which we know of Moses. One of them is a silhouette which he probably produced himself, although Raphael may have made it, but most likely it was a self-silhouette, sort of a self-portrait. And the other likeness is a painting executed by Rembrandt for which he's believed to have modeled. He's dressed as a Hawaiian chief, and the model is a very light-skinned black man who almost looks more like he's of Hispanic descent or perhaps Hawaiian. And we do know from records that Moses was mixed race. Charles Wilson Peale frequently referred to in letters as my mulatto man. I find it interesting that in no source was it ever even hinted that Charles may have been his father. Depending on when he was born, that wouldn't have been possible. For instance, if he was born in 1775 and his parents weren't even acquired until 1775, that certainly wouldn't have been a possibility. And there are records that both his parents were mixed race, so most likely Scarborough, later John Williams, was in fact his father. But I can't help but wonder whether some of the other Peale children, particularly Rembrandt, resented the fact that this former slave was sort of treated as part of the family, even though most likely he was not biologically related to them. I think that it sort of rubbed them the wrong way, particularly because there clearly was a lot of competition in the family with that many brothers, and Mr. Peale was undoubtedly a very strong personality. After achieving his freedom in 1802, Moses continued working at the museum, which indicates that he had friendly feelings toward the Peale family. He had his own little concessionaire with the portraits and he continued working there for several years, making so much money that he was able to buy himself a two-story house. He married a woman named Maria, who was the white cook of the Peale family, which I found fascinating that he was able to have a mixed-race marriage at that time. They had several children together. Unfortunately, silhouettes were not always popular and their popularity began to decline in the following years, so eventually he did lose his house. But he always was able to rely on this artistic training of using the physiognathrace, and it was a skill which he retained and which kept him from having to do other forms of manual labor or something like that, because clearly he was a very gifted artist. His legacy was scarcely known until the 1990s, at which point people began to discover just how many of these silhouettes he had rendered. It's believed that he made around 8,000 of them. The silhouettes weren't usually marked very clearly. A lot of times they were merely stamped with Peale or Philadelphia Museum, but it's believed that most of the ones that were stamped for the museum were created by Moses Williams. Moses is definitely the most complex member of the greater Peale family dynasty. Not an actual member of the family, but a very important member of the household. His role is a fascinating one to study, since it both is one showing the history of slavery in the United States and one which challenges the stereotypes that all Black people were slaves until the 1860s and that there were no opportunities, because despite the fact that he was born into slavery, he became a self-sufficient artist who was able to make his own living and support his family, marrying a white woman because of the money he made through his art. It's very interesting, and it is interesting to see the silhouettes which he rendered. You can look him up and find many of those silhouettes, which are very striking and a fascinating lost art. Moses Williams definitely deserves a place of recognition as an American artist who bettered himself through artistic discipline and helped develop the technology which would eventually lead to photography. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.