With over seventy paintings signed by or firmly attributed to his hand, Edward Caledon Bruce (1825–1900) is best known as one of the most productive artists in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and the state capitol of Richmond.
Lesser known is Bruce’s importance as an example of an American artist with acquired deafness: Bruce became deaf due to complications from scarlet fever he contracted when around fourteen years old. With few options for formal deaf education in his native Valley—the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind in Staunton did not open until 1839—Bruce initially foresaw a life “shut out… by the iron hand of sorrow,” as he later recollected (Merritt n.d.).
By the early 1840s, however, Bruce traveled to Philadelphia to study with the greatest American portraitist of the era, Thomas Sully. Bruce’s time in Philadelphia marked the beginning of nearly six decades of continuous artistic production, as well as parallel careers as an author and newspaper printer in Winchester, Virginia and today’s Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. In Bruce’s own words, his exposure to art offered an escape:
It was like another glimpse of the world to me… better to think to some purpose, and think to live instead of living to think. I have much to be thankful for, and in all that I have set my heart on my success has been encouraging… thank God I have my sight yet—all Nature can speak to me through that sense (Merritt n.d.).
As a deaf Southerner living and working both before and after the Civil War, though, painter was just one of Edward Bruce’s multiple identities. Others included father, husband, son, secessionist, soldier, and enslaver. Bruce’s role as an enslaver in antebellum Virginia particularly prompts questions about the entanglement of enslavement, physical disability, and power in individual lives in ways that have only recently begun to be considered (Cleall 2023).
Quite understandably, most research into the relationship between Atlantic World slavery and disability examines the disabling effects of enslavement on Black bodies, particularly in the context of sugar plantations in the Caribbean where the very process of the cane crop’s cultivation and refinement threatened workers with dismemberment and death (Hunt-Kennedy 2020). An examination of the antebellum North American household of Edward Bruce, meanwhile, invites a new perspective. What occurs when enslaved people lived and worked in the house of a disabled enslaver, in this case a deaf one? Did those individuals leverage Bruce’s deafness to subvert the power dynamic of enslaver and enslaved? As evidenced in Bruce’s few publicly available writings, he frequently carried a notepad to communicate with hearing individuals. Were the enslaved people in Bruce’s household taught or encouraged to learn to read and write in order to fulfill their domestic roles and communicate with the man who held them in bondage, despite laws forbidding literacy? Were home signs developed and used in the Bruce household? (see D’Ambrosio 2006, 5).
Unfortunately, Bruce’s extensive personal diaries remain lost, limiting our ability to answer such questions. However, we can reconstruct some of the circumstances surrounding the Bruce family household. As members of Virginia’s planter class with roots in Jamestown, Bruce’s maternal Smith line had relied on the labor of enslaved people for generations. The Smiths were part of a large migration of Tidewater Virginia planters into the Shenandoah Valley following the American Revolution, prompted by the exhaustion of Chesapeake soil from centuries of tobacco overcultivation. By the 1860 U.S. census, six enslaved people lived in the Bruce household.
Five of those individuals were enslaved by Edward and his wife Eliza Hubard Bruce: a 33-year-old Black woman, two Black boys aged six and seven respectively, and a one-year-old infant girl listed as “mulatto” (a derogatory term applied to multiracial people) (Bruce Slave Schedule 1860). Also living in the household was a 29-year-old Black woman enslaved by Bruce’s mother, Sidney Smith Bruce (1794–1874) who lived with the family. By 1870, 60-year-old Mary Corbin lived with and presumably worked for the Bruce family (Corbin Census Record 1870).
Excerpt from 1870 U.S. Census including Mary Corbin. Reproduced from Ancestry.com / Family Search.
While not of an age to have been either of the Black women identified in 1860, Corbin might have been related to one of the Bruces’ former bondspeople.
For enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia in the wake of Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, legal avenues for education were few. All Southern states except Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee passed laws forbidding teaching enslaved people to read and write. Free Black communities in Virginia also experienced renewed restrictions of their rights and movements in this period. Still, Virginia’s General Assembly made exceptions to state anti-literacy laws when measured against the needs of disabled white Virginians, including in Bruce’s own Shenandoah Valley.
In 1842, Robert Gray of Harrisonburg in Rockingham County successfully petitioned the Assembly to allow a young enslaved boy, Randolph, to be educated so that he in turn might aid Gray’s son Henry Juett Gray, “a blind youth of reputable character and exemplary deportment, who…is desirous of qualifying himself to become a teacher of the blind.” (Commonwealth of Virginia 1842, 164). Claiming that “it is necessary that he should have the services of a servant capable of reading and writing, which object cannot be permanently secured otherwise,” the Assembly assented that Henry Gray “or any friend for him, to employ from time to time any competent white person or persons to teach the said slave Randolph reading and writing, and for such white person or persons to so teach said slave without incurring any of the penalties by the law in such cases.” To assuage white paranoia about educated Black people in the Valley, however, the Assembly further required Henry’s father to provide surety in the amount not less than double Randolph’s value as an adult enslaved man, thus “indemnifying the commonwealth and citizens thereof against the improper use by said slave of the art of reading and writing.” Unfortunately, to date, no similar petitions have been found on behalf of the Bruce family and those they enslaved.
Evidence at Belle Grove Plantation, between Harrisonburg and Bruce’s Winchester, also reveals that while anti-literacy may have been the law of Virginia, in practice it was challenged, ignored, and subverted. Enslaved Black people were active consumers of a variety of material goods, including writing implements and reading materials. Excavations led by archaeologist Matt Greer of Syracuse University of the Belle Grove slave quarters have unearthed fragments of writing slates and slate pencils dating to contexts spanning the 1830s–1840s (Matthew Greer, Email message to author, December 16, 2020). While not documented in the available Bruce materials, perhaps white and Black members of the Bruce family had an unspoken (and thus undocumented) agreement about the necessity of literacy.
Many questions remain, such as: did Edward Bruce’s deafness create opportunities for resistance not possible in hearing households, from everyday acts to more substantial ones? How did other white, hearing members of the Bruce household—particularly women like Edward’s wife Eliza and elderly mother Sidney—compensate for a family member who otherwise might surveil and control by listening?
The answers to many of these questions can likely only be answered by locating Edward Bruce’s multiple diaries—still in family hands as of the 1980s—and collecting oral histories of descendants of those enslaved by the Bruce family
References
Cleall, Esme. 2023. “Living, Promoting and Opposing Enslavement: Six Disabled People in Britain and the Caribbean, c. 1750-1840.” Presentation at Disability in the Vast Early Americas Conference, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN.
Commonwealth of Virginia. 1842. Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia, Passed at the Session Commencing 6th December 1841, and Ending 26th March 1842, in the Sixty-Sixth Year of the Commonwealth. Richmond, VA: Samuel Shepherd.
D’Ambrosio, Paul S. 2006. The World of John Brewster Jr. 1766-1854. Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum.
Hunt-Kennedy, Stefanie. 2020. Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Merritt, Elise Oldham. n.d. “Edward C. Bruce.” Edward C. Bruce Collection (504 WFCHS), Stewart Bell Jr. Archives, Handley Regional Library, Winchester, VA.
United States. 1860. Slave Schedule Record for Edward C. Bruce. Winchester, Frederick County, VA, Eighth Census of the United States, Series Number M653, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
United States. 1870. Census Record for Mary Corbin (b. ca. 1810). Winchester, Frederick County, VA, Ninth Census of the United States, Series Number M593, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Additional Works Consulted
Barclay, Jenifer. 2021. The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Boster, Dea H. 2013. African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860. New York: Routledge.
Greer, Matthew Clark. 2022. “Assembling Enslaved Lives: Labor, Consumption, and Landscapes in the Northern Shenandoah Valley.” Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University.
Seminario, Linda A. 2023. ‘“Provisioned, Produced, Procured,’ and Purchased?: A Macrobotanical Study of Enslaved Individuals’ Economic Entanglement in the Shenandoah Valley.” Master’s thesis, University of Massachusetts, Boston.
A. Nicholas “Nick” Powers is Curator of Collections at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia. Along with the Virginia Museum of History & Culture in Richmond, the MSV holds the largest number of works by Edward Caledon Bruce in a public institution. Powers can be reached at npowers@themsv.org.
